Union Literary Institute

The Union Literary Institute opened in 1846 with a constitution that broke Indiana law in spirit: 'any distinction on account of colour, rank or wealth' would not be tolerated — in a state whose laws flatly barred Black children from public schools. The board was biracial from its first meeting — Quakers from Newport and free Black settlers from the Greenville Settlement, a community straddling the Indiana-Ohio line that the state line itself couldn't divide. Students labored four hours a day for room and board; by 1850, ninety-seven Black students and thirty-four white students had attended — three-quarters of the school was the population Indiana refused to educate.

The school sat at the center of Randolph County's three Black rural settlements — Cabin Creek, Greenville, Snow Hill — in Quaker country where the Underground Railroad ran thick. The Clemens family of Longtown — James Clemens had been the first Black man to buy land in Darke County in 1818 — were conductors on the railroad and founders of the school; their sons sat on its first board. The institute itself was a documented stop: a school that taught the hunted between sheltering them.

Its alumni reached far — Willis Revels, brother of Hiram Revels (the first Black U.S. senator), studied there before pastoring Indianapolis's Bethel AME, which burned under arson in 1862. The 1860 brick building stands as a ruin being stabilized — the manual-labor school where Indiana's excluded educated each other.

Union Literary Institute is the archive's constitution file — the 1846 biracial boarding school that educated Black and white students together against Indiana's exclusion laws, run by the Quaker and free Black families who also ran the railroad.