Working as a Digital Project Intern with Wabash College’s Ramsay Archival Center, I worked extensively with material gathered by Dr. Timothy Lake in his 2010 catalog of Black Cultural Sites in Indiana. Unfortunately for optics, working in the archives is just as sexy as it sounds. Much of my time was spent in a chair, typing away on a computer. One of my final days on the job involved a visit to the Indiana Historical Society, where we got a backstage tour of a much larger operation, displaying what a more hands-on material collection looks like. As an aspiring historian striving to enter a market that is both extremely competitive while contracting, gaining experience in any related field is essential. Gathering materials from archives was always my last resort, working with secondary and academic resources has always come easier. Similarly, I’ve always enjoyed working as a ‘big picture guy’ in lieu of local history. Working with the archives shoved me right out of that comfort zone. Not only was I behind enemy lines (the archive), but the primary subject of my work intimately followed Black History on the county and township scale. I grew up in Indiana, but never earnestly engaged with her history. As I would soon find, working in the Ramsay Archives was a perfect opportunity to connect with my state.
That isn’t to say that the work was boring. I got to sort through material as old as the state itself, acting like an amateur detective sorting through newspaper clippings. While much of the processed material surrounded ‘Black Advancement’, there were multiple rather bleak artifacts.
Some of the more serious moments involved lynchings in Hamilton County and the Hancock County Fair. I feel like many Hoosiers forget that, even though we are north of the Mason-Dixon Line, our Black history is not all sunshine. In my opinion, the greatest lesson from the Black Cultural Sites Project is the African American presence in Indiana before the Civil War. Indiana’s Black History did not begin with emancipation.
While one of my side projects involving historic census data fell through, another involving the African Methodist Episcopal Church soon captured my attention. The AME Church spread from its epicenter of Philadelphia to Indiana around the turn of the 19th century,
following black migration into the territory. Not only did the pattern of established AME churches line up with the strongest Black communities by county, but they represented an invaluable source for the experience of African Americans in Antebellum Indiana. This project
also led to experience with new online platforms of public history, working with IU’s Discover Indiana and creating my first Wikipedia articles (something that would seem unthinkable to a younger me).
This project left such an impact on me that, upon visiting a friend in Philadelphia following the internship, I had to stop by ‘Mother Bethel’, the AME Church’s origin. Hoping to find more resources on Indiana AME’s 1840 ‘Blue River Conference’, I attempted to get into contact with Mother Bethel’s archivist. A week after the conclusion of my internship, I arrived at
Mother Bethel, despite the lack of a follow-up. In a wonderful lesson of archival availability, Mother Bethel and their archive had been closed to the public for months. History is very rarely agreeable or accessible, but the latter should be a principal objective of archives. Each archive, like each historian, represents a piece of a larger picture. I must give special thanks to Nolan and Evan in the Archives for being such accommodating supervisors, as well as the Restoring Hope Restoring Trust grant for making Dr.
Lake’s research possible in the first place. It was an absolute pleasure to work with his gathered material. I consider my work with the archives invaluable from a professional and personal perspective.
