Lyles Station and Gibson County underground railroad.

We had been wanting to go see Lyles station which was a black settlement in Gibson Count Indiana. The community was founded in 1849, but many black settlers were already in the area by 1830’s. Lyles Station reached its peak in the years between 1880 and 1912, when major structures in the community included the railroad depot, a post office, a lumber mill, a school, two churches, and two general stores. The community incorporated and was formally named Lyles Station in 1886 in honor of Joshua Lyles a free African American who migrated with his family from Tennessee to Indiana around 1837. By the turn of the twentieth century, the settlement had fifty-five homes, with a population of more than 800 people. Heavy rains caused the White, Wabash, and Patoka Rivers to overflow their banks during the Great Flood of 1913. The catastrophic flood destroyed much of Lyles Station. Many families started to slowly leave the area after the flood. There are about 6 families that still live in the Lyles Station area.

We also wanted to learn more about the underground railroad and some of the key people of the underground railroad. Which we began this adventure with first, before we got to Lyles Station.

Below is the video that we took on our trip and if you want to see more pictures and information that we were not able to get in the video keep reading.

Our first stop was to visit the grave site of Charles Grier. We learned that Charles Grier was one of Gibson County’s earliest African American settlers, along with his wife Keziah. Charles moved to Indiana in 1813 just after the war of 1812. Charles was a freed slave from Virginia. He had been brought to the territory in order to be freed and picked his new last name to honor the Rev. Grier — the man who freed him.

While visiting Lyles Station later in the trip we learned that Indiana in the start of 1813 was an anti-slave state. Which most of the times the laws where not enforced on slavery. Keziah, Charles wife, had also been born enslaved and had been brought to Indiana from South Carolina by her owner when he moved to Indiana. It is not really known how Keziah was able to gain her freedom but by 1818 Charles and Keziah was married.

Charles Grier lived close to where he is now resting in Antioch Cemetery. Our first stop was to visit Charles and Keziah Grier’s grave site.

At their grave site you will find a marker that was installed by the National Underground Railroad network to freedom. Both Charles and his wife helped shelter and move 600 people from their farm on to the next underground railroad station. Many of these people most likely passed through Lyles Station as they headed to the next station.

One of the next station up the line would have been the place of David and Mary Stormont’s farm and at a log cabin on their property. About 2.5 miles northwest of the town of Princeton Indiana. The Stormont’s moved their goods by wagons and also used the Wabash and Erie canal. Which would help move the runaway slaves north to the next station.

We also visited David and Mary Stormont resting place in Archer Cemetery, in Princeton Indiana.

It is a shame that their headstone was so hard to read and make out.

Lastly, we drove over to visit Lyles Station Museum, which is the restored school building of Lyles Station community

There was so much to learn that we could not cover it all in the video that we made. Just like learning that even though Indiana was an anti-slave state and really did not enforce the laws. But that over time more and more anti-black laws were put in place. By around 1850 a black person could not buy ground in Indiana and those that did own ground before the new law was put in place had to prove that they were free and owned the land by having white people signing their names to the fact. This was just one more thing that the Grier’s had to deal with in their lives. If they got into any trouble, they could lose all their land and be put in jail or worst.

There were also people that was called “Wolfs” who would take black people and sell them back into slavery in the south. They lived and hunted up and down the anti-slave states for runaway slaves and even freed slaves that they could catch alone. This is why many blacks would form settlements like Lyles Station to help protect each other and could also help hide runaway slaves.

Once you go in the front door to the school you have to go down the stairs to the lower level. The lady that gave us the tour lived in the area and had so much knowledge about Lyles Station and all the other Black settlements in the area. The lower level has meeting rooms and in the hallway is information about the teachers at the school. On the other side of the hallway there are artifact’s that show what daily life was like in the 1880’s.

You have your choice of taking the stairs or an elevator to the upper floor. The first room the tour went to was a room for some of the prominent citizens of Lyles station.

On the right is Lyman Parks. He was born in 1917 at Lyles Station. He talked about the hardships that he and other blacks had to endure while going to college at Indiana State Teachers College. He and the other black students couldn’t go in the college bookstore or sit while drinking a soda inside they had to go outside. In time Parks went on to become a minister. He ended up in grand rapids Michigan as a Minister of First Community A.M.E church in 1971. He then became the first black mayor of grand rapids. During his time in Michigan, he got to know Gerald Ford who was a senator at the time. In 1972 Ford invited Parks to give the invocation at the opening session of the Republican National Convention. Then Ford appointed Parker to serve as a personal representative of the International Trade Fair in Zagreb Yugoslavia.

Dr. Virgil A. Clift was born in 1912 and grew up in Lyles Station. He went to school at the Lyles Station school and then went on to college at Indiana University and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree. He then went to Indiana State University to get his M. A. degree. He then went on to earn his PH. D. of teacher’s education and higher learning from Ohio State University and Honorary Doctorate of Humanities (Indiana State University Evansville). Virgil also held a great reputation for education internationally, as he became a Fulbright Lecturer and Research Scholar in teacher education in Pakistan in 1954. Additionally, he served as an education advisor of the U.S. State Department’s Agency for International Development to the Kingdom of Libya.

Alonzo Fields was born in 1900 at Lyles Station. His father was the leader of the town’s Colored brass band, and this early musical influence would have a profound impact on Alonzo’s life. He left in 1925 to enroll in Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, where he would pursue a degree to teach music. During his stay in Boston he had come under the sponsorship of Dr. Samuel Stratton, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Stratton’s financial support of Alonzo’s studies made his dream of pursuing a career in music a very real possibility. Upon the death of Dr. Stratton, Alonzo Fields did not have a job or support. Mrs. Herbert Hoover remembered a young man named “Fields” who had waited on her during her visit to the Stratton household. She called him up and offered him a job as a butler in the White House. After serving under President Hoover, Alonzo stayed on with FDR and was at the President’s side throughout the Second World War. During this time he also met and became a confidant of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. But Harry Truman was, without a doubt, Alonzo’s favorite President.

After his time in the White House, he went on to write a book called My 21 years in the White House. Which has also been turned into a Play and Movie.

As the tour takes us down the hallway that has a poster that lists the names of the 1840’s settlers.

Even today the descendants of those early settlers are making news here in Lyles Station. Although most of Indiana’s black rural settlements no longer exist as self-contained communities, Lyles Station continues.

On the left you can see the list of all the black settlements in Indiana before the civil war. and on the right, you can see a handmade map of the black communities around Lyles Station.

The room we are entering was once a classroom and now displays how the farm life was like around Lyles Station.

Here you can see the collection of hand tools on the left. On the right are some house collars and saddles. How many of the tools can you name? Cheryl and I did fair but there was many that we had not seen before.

On the left we can see a spinning wheel and a weaving loom. The spinning wheel would take the cotton that was grown here and spin it to make threads. They would then take it to the weaving loop to make cloth or sheets. These could be used to make clothing, bed sheet, or anything that needed cloth.

The poster here is the timeline of Lyles Station. When you look at the top of this posture, it has a picture, that was found, of one farm’s family and workers. The owner of the farm and his family are on the left and on the right are all the people hired to help as farm hands. I do not know how big this farm was but look at all the livestock that is being used and all the hired hands.

Every year Lyles Sation puts on an event “Farm to Table” to help teach about how our food is grown and how it gets to our tables every day.

Our tour ended in the second classroom that is set up to show how the classrooms were used when the school was in operation.

This is what their classroom would have looked like in the 1880’s. They even have tablets at each of their tables. Just that they are made out of slate and students had to use chalk to write with.

Each year Lyles Station hosts field trips for kids that are home schooled and for kids in the public schools. This is called the Heritage Classroom Field Trip which give children a look and feel of how school would have been like in the 1900’s. The next one is Work and Play Field Trip where students will make candles, churn butter, wash clothes on a washboard, play marbles, shell corn through a hand-cranked machine and other activities. A tour of the museum, the log cabin, and the Heritage Classroom, which includes a short handwriting lesson on the slate boards are included. The last is Civil War Experience which children will have the opportunity to experience what life was like during the mid-1800’s and the Civil War through interactive demonstrations and engaging educational activities that bring the past to life.