Rural Roots

Historic districts, designated at the federal, state, or local level, encompass a collection of buildings and structures connected by a shared geography and history. Though such districts often center around downtown commercial areas and historic neighborhoods, rural historic districts can help tell the story of those who settled outside urban areas. In Washington County, recent inclusion of the Blue River Quaker Settlement Rural Historic District in the National Register of Historic Places brings opportunities to raise awareness of the area’s history and preserve its landmarks.

The 1,670-acre area, comprised of rolling hills, wooded streams, fencerows, and cultivated farmland, contains a mix of historic sites located on and around Quaker Road northeast of the county seat of Salem. The district’s historic architecture includes log homes, I-houses and barns, frame Victorian houses, and two churches associated with the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers, who played a key role in settling the area. The historic district also includes four early cemeteries, one of which is on the site of the former Salem African American Methodist Episcopal Church and believed to contain the unmarked graves of nearly 100 African Americans who also settled in the area.

In the first decade of the nineteenth century before Indiana achieved statehood, the region opened for settlement. Among the first to arrive were Quakers from North Carolina, whose opposition to slavery spurred them to relocate from the South. The Society of Friends found southern Indiana’s landscape comparable to the Piedmont region of North Carolina and established a meeting house and farms in the area. Early Quaker families included the household of Jesse Spurgeon, who came to the area in 1804 and returned to North Carolina to share news of the area’s potential. He returned in 1805 as a permanent settler, joined by the Lindley, Albertson, Coffin, Hobbs, Moore, Newby, and Trueblood families. Farms and associated farmsteads connected with some of these pioneering families—some of which represent multi-generations of settlement— remain within the historic district today.

Free Blacks as well as freedom-seekers fleeing slavery also migrated to the area as they found safety and refuge among members of the Society of Friends and formed their own settlements nearby, including an area known as “Africa Town” to the east of Salem. Quakers Thomas Trueblood, a minister of the Society of Friends, and James Thompson were known to have aided escaping slaves as part of a secretive network commonly referred to today as the Underground Railroad. Quaker families within the Blue River Settlement sponsored freedom certificates and emancipation papers for several Blacks in the area.

Sadly, physical remnants of these early Black settlers has largely been lost. The Salem AME Church and associated cemetery, considered the principal and oldest burying ground for African Americans in Washington County, is located near the Blue River Quaker Settlement. While the church no longer stands and no gravestones are known to exist on site, the location has been preserved and memorialized with a historical marker. Additional graves of African Americans are known to exist within the Blue River Friends Orthodox Cemetery, also located within the recently listed rural historic district.

Indiana Landmarks Sacred Places Indiana program supported the nomination of the Blue River Quaker Settlement Rural Historic District to the National Register of Historic Places with a $6,000 grant to Salem’s John Hay Center, which hired Kurt Garner Consulting to research and prepare the historic district nomination.

“As one of the many descendants still residing in Washington County from several of the pioneering Quaker families that settled the Blue River Quaker community, I’m thrilled to see the proper recognition bestowed upon these historically significant people and their laborious efforts and contributions to civilize our county and state,” says Jeremy Elliott, John Hay Center executive director.