Historic Eleutherian College

Eleutherian College — the name is Greek for freedom — was a school built as an act of defiance ten miles from slavery. The Neil's Creek Anti-Slavery Society formed in Lancaster, Indiana, in 1839 — fifty men and thirty-two women, mostly New England transplants, in a county where the settlers were largely Kentuckians and Virginians hostile to abolitionist agitation. When Rev. Thomas Craven preached to them in 1846, he challenged them to educate the free and the escaped — and the congregation built the Eleutherian Institute in 1848, open to students regardless of race or sex.

The school was illegal by the standards of its own state — Indiana's 1852 Negro Exclusion Law prohibited free Black people from migrating into the state, and Eleutherian enrolled Black students from throughout the South anyway, on a hilltop ten miles from the Kentucky shore. At its peak in the mid-1850s a hundred students attended; the community around it was a documented Underground Railroad station on the Madison-to-Indianapolis route. Craven's tombstone at College Hill Cemetery reads: 'A Christian Reformer. Philanthropist; with His Son Founder of The Eleutherian College. Open to all without regard to sex or color.'

The war that vindicated it killed it — male students and teachers enlisted in 1861, the funding dried up, and the college faded despite decades of attempts to reinvent it as a normal school. The three-story Classroom and Chapel building of 1854–56 survives — a National Historic Landmark on the hill above the river where an integrated college operated in a state that had legally banned the enrollment of half its students.

Eleutherian is the archive's defiant-school file — the college that admitted Black students ten miles from Kentucky in a state that had outlawed their presence, founded by a congregation that ran a station and built a school on the same conviction.