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Legacy of Lyles Station

George Vaughn, standing on an F20 Farmall

Brothers Joshua and Sanford Lyles, freed slaves who arrived and purchased land in Gibson County in the late 1850’s, founded the community. It took the name Lyles Station in 1886 with the establishment of a railroad station there, an event which greatly assisted the area’s economic development. The town flourished during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and developed into a self-sustaining town of approximately 800 residents. During its peak (1880-1913) Lyles Station consisted of fifty-five homes, an elementary school, two churches, two general stores and a lumber mill.

Lyles Station produced proclaimed scholars and educators. It gave Indiana its first African American postmaster north of the Mason-Dixon Line in the person of Mr. William Roundtree. The organizer and first principal of Crispus Attucks high school in Indianapolis was born and reared in the Lyles Station community. Lyles Station is the home of Alonzo Fields, grandson of a freed slave who became Chief Butler at the White House for four US Presidents. The tiny community braved the danger of harboring fugitive slaves. When the Civil War erupted, Lyles Station furnished the nation soldiers. Young men of Lyles were among the first to fight in Cuba.

Heavy flooding in 1913 did much damage to the town and signaled the gradual decline in its vitality. A core of the community has remained at Lyles Station making it the single surviving rural African American community in Indiana. The settlement was and continues to be a self-sustaining farming community. Although the population has dwindled from its booming days, a small number of African American farmers continue to farm as their ancestors did over a hundred years ago.

Lyles Station is an extraordinary distinction as dozens of other antebellum African American communities (typically referred to as “settlements”) had been founded in Indiana during the mid- nineteenth century. Lyles Station alone survives as a living community while others remain only in vestigial form or have vanished altogether.