186 years ago on January 5, a meeting was held in a public schoolhouse on Neil’s Creek in Jefferson County, Indiana.¹ The purpose of the meeting was to form “an anti-slavery society,” according to Benjamin  Hoyt, one of the founders of the Neil’s Creek Anti-Slavery Society and its first secretary. 

The founding document was signed by 50 men and 32 women, all  pioneers who moved to the area from Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania in the north, and the southern states of Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina. How these families were lured or driven to the wilderness of southeastern Indiana is unclear, but it seems possible it could have been more than just a coincidence. 

Their goals—unpopular in the county, if not outright dangerous—were to work together and with other societies influence Congress to end the domestic slave trade, to abolish slavery in the states where it existed––especially in the District of Columbia––and to prevent its extension into states not yet admitted into the Union. Many, if not all of the families involved, participated as conductors on local routes of the Underground Railroad, which had many agents in Madison, including George DeBaptiste, who later moved to continue the work in Detroit; John Carter, a grocer on Second Street; and the Rev. Chapman Harris, a blacksmith at Eagle Hollow. 

This first meeting and others through May 3, 1845, are documented in a ledger that is now located at the Indiana State Library. The ledger was a² gift to the state in 1903 from Laura Smith King (granddaughter of founder Lyman Hoyt and daughter of his son, the society’s secretary, Benjamin.) An Indianapolis resident, Laura was married to William Smith King in 1867 in that city, where the couple raised their six children. 

The gift was the subject of a newspaper article published in the June 14, 1903, issue of the Indianapolis Journal, that told of the society’s secret work decades earlier. 

According to William C. Thompson, who wrote an article on the  “Eleutherian Institute” in Lancaster for the Indiana Magazine of History, the institute was established in 1848 by the Neil’s Creek Anti-Slavery Baptist Church. The original society had disbanded in 1845, but was reorganized³ by some of the society’s founding members. 

The institute, later known as Eleutherian College, was founded by several families in and around the Lancaster area; surnames include Hoyt, Nelson, Tibbets, Walton, Hughes, Thompson, Record, Lewis, Cushman, Hicklin, and Craven. 

Throughout the coming months, this blog will focus on the stories of these families and their contributions not only to the fight against slavery, but to the establishment of educational opportunities for all students—black and white, male or female—in the early years of the state of Indiana. 

1. Neil’s Creek is located three miles west of Lancaster, a once-bustling town built at the confluence of Middlefork Creek and Big Creek. Lancaster, itself, was about 10 miles northwest  of the city of Madison, the seat of Jefferson County. ↩︎
2.  Copies of the ledger are available for perusal or for purchase at the Jefferson County History & Art Center on West First Street in Madison, Indiana. ↩︎
3. Volume 19, No. 2, pages 109-131, June 1923, “Eleutherian Instititute: A Sketch of a Unique Step in the Educational History of Indiana,” William C. Thompson, Indianapolis. The article also  includes an extensive biographical sketch of the Rev. Thomas Craven, who founded the school. Thompson was a grandson of the Rev. Craven, whose daughter Lucy was William’s mother. ↩︎