The Weight of a Human Soul:
Memory as Resistance

“There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple... The shape [of our story] does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or other, died. . . . Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod; but have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'll mistake one for another” (Gaiman 248).

Introduction

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In the above excerpt from Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods, he goes on to write that “without individuals we see only numbers, a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead,” yet, when we read individual stories, “the statistics become people.” Stories, according to Gaiman, allow us to “slide into these other heads, these other places,” and see the lives of the people who lived the story. Gaiman and I agree on this point, which became relevant while researching early Black experiences in pre-Civil War Putnam County, Indiana. It must be noted that hardly any stories remain in Putnam County’s official records. The scarcity of records documenting the lives of Black residents in Putnam County is not neutral or merely an accident—it is a reflection of deliberate institutional neglect. Schools, churches, and municipal offices failed to include Black communities in their official documentation, and when they did, those records were frequently fragmented, misclassified, or nothing more than a population count. This is a form of historical oppression that often renders Black lives invisible to future generations. It is also true that this absence of meaningful data functioned as a form of agency for Black citizens in pre-Civil War Putnam County because secrecy became synonymous with safety.
 

When this necessity of secrecy is taken into consideration, Putnam County’s vague archives on Black individuals can be interpreted, in part, as a form of Black agency rather than loss—an active choice, a strategy to survive. Scholars examining Black experiences in Indiana during the pre- Civil War era have primarily focused on two related areas: the state’s involvement in the operation of the Underground Railroad, and Indiana’s position as a free state bordering the slave-holding south (“The Underground Railroad,” (Weik 197–200). In an era steeped in racial violence, Indiana laws and political systems were designed to exploit visibility, which means secrecy was often a necessary component of survival for Black citizens. The best example of this necessary secrecy surrounds the county’s role in the Underground Railroad: There is no record of who did or did not traverse the path of this secret network because recording such information would more than likely result in punishment, including a return to enslavement. In this way, the omission of official records becomes a form of resistance, yet I find this does not erase my human desire to remember.

 

To forget entirely is to deny the depth and dignity of the meaning in lives lived, which seems too close to the lack of dignity and meaning created by what is lacking in Putnam County’s official records. To prevent our “slates” from being wiped as clean as John Locke’s tabula rasa, humans remember. We count the days and hours as they pass, ticking us ever closer to memoryless oblivion, and when someone we love dies, we have a funeral, and we write an obituary, and we make memorials to mark their grave. Why? Because humans, intrinsically, derive meaning from our memories, and in these memories, individual stories are told. Without individual stories, we see only numbers, and numbers strip individuals of their memory—of their humanity. Without memory, the meaning of a life lived is lost to time, and in the case of Putnam County, countless lives have gone unremembered, many without even so much as a headstone left to mark their passing.

 

Microhistorical Approach and Context

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Memory is a foundational human need, it is how humans create meaning in their lives, and it is how we fight against the inevitable oblivion of death and time. But, in the absence of meaningful official records on early Black experiences in Putnam County, a microhistorical approach becomes necessary. Institutional neglect is the driving force that has encouraged historians to rely on microhistory as a valuable method of historical research. Microhistorical studies emphasize the experiences of marginalized individuals by looking closely at individual experiences wherever they can be found: primary sources, oral stories, and other atypical records with limited authority. In examining these sources, micro-historians often uncover information omitted from limited, even white- washed, official archives.

One notable contributor to microhistorical studies is Carlo Ginzburg, who claims that studying localized and specific individual experiences can reveal truths about the lives of marginalized people (Ginzburg 2023). As Ginzburg suggests, this method is helpful when dealing with gaps created by active erasure, such as in the case of Putnam County. Likewise, Ukrainian micro-historian Vsevolod Chekanov claims that microhistory puts the emphasis on the individual experience, emotions, and thoughts of a human being who has been “overlooked” in official records (Chekanov 70). Memory consists of individual experiences, emotions, and thoughts that have filled our lives and the lives of those we love. Because of this, individual experiences are much more important than large-scale historical narratives like those available in the official Putnam County records of Black experiences, which are mostly in the form of census records and court dockets.

 

The Townsend Family: Memories of The Townsends’ Arrival in Putnam County

 

The Townsends are the first recorded Black family to live in Putnam County Indiana. While it seems likely that other Black residents lived in the county before them, I have found no record of it, and so it is also possible that Luke and Charity Townsend were the first. James Townsend, who began his life in Maryland then moved to Kentucky, inherited many slaves following his parents’ death. He reportedly emancipated the enslaved people he inherited, and thereafter, deciding to leave the state, invited any who wished to come with him to Putnam County, Indiana. In 1828, James Townsend, accompanied by eight people he had so recently owned, settled in what is now Putnamville, Indiana, where they built log cabins and took James Townsend’s surname as their own. Among the eight people were Luke Enos Townsend, his wife Charity Jones Townsend, Luke and Charity’s children, and an unmarried man named Tom (Weik 200). Though not all of them were born when they first moved to Putnam County, Luke and Charity ultimately had twelve children: Agnes Lucy, Private Robert E., Mary J., William H., Julia A., Margaret, Ellen, Martha Catherine, Jay Thomas, Luke Enos Jr., John, and Myrtie (Huber, “Luke Enos ‘Uncle Luke’ Townsend”).
 

In the absence of formal records, it is personal stories that help preserve Black voices. Such stories are passed down by descendants, neighbors, and early microhistoricists like Jesse Weik, the author of Weik’s History of Putnam County, Indiana. Weik compiled some information on Luke and Charity Townsend, mostly from James Layman, another resident of Putnam County who was closely associated with the Townsends. Layman told Weik that: 

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Layman tells Weik that he even remembers filling “‘old Grandmother Sibley's pipe with tobacco for her before the fireplace when she was past ninety years of age’” (Weik 199). While Weik’s discussion of the Townsends in brief, these memories restore a sense of humanity and meaning to the Townsend’s lives. If left to Indiana’s official archive, we would only have a census record and a family plot of headstones so worn by weather they are hardly legible.

 

The Townsends’ Lasting Legacy

 

Luke and Charity Townsend did their share of resisting archival erasure. Amidst harsh, exclusionary laws that sought to erase Black presence—the 1816 Constitution limiting suffrage to whites; the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; and the 1851 Constitution banning Black settlement—Luke and Charity Townsend founded the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in Greencastle, Indiana. The Townsends were actively resisting, striving to provide early Black residents a sense of community. Arnold Cooper’s article, which traces the founding and development of the church, discusses how the formal consecration of the church in July 1890 represented the success of Townsend’s community-building efforts (Cooper 101–3). Cooper emphasizes the Bethel A.M.E. Church as a testament to the perseverance and faith of Black residents, especially Luke and Charity Townsend, who, despite living under racial restrictions, helped foster a growing Black community in Putnam County (Cooper 101–2). Luke and Charity Townsend’s role in founding the Bethel A.M.E. Church reveals agency in resisting Putnam County’s neglect in official documentation. It was people like Luke and Charity Townsend who helped Black communities create their own spaces to preserve memory and identity. While James Townsend’s influence might have contributed to the preservation of the information I have found in my research, Luke and Charity’s role in the church’s 1890 consecration allowed it to become a place of living archive, capable of preserving the stories and struggles of its congregants in ways that Putnam County’s official records on Black lives do not.

Luke Townsend’s Obituary

 

Sadly, though the Bethel A.M.E. church operated much earlier than its official opening in 1890, Luke Townsend did not live to see his work come to fruition. Luke Townsend's obituary becomes more prominent thanks to Susan Turpin Huber, a contributor to the Find a Grave database, who created a memorial page for “Luke Enos ‘Uncle Luke’ Townsend.” In 1870, 20 years before the Bethel A.M.E. Church officially opened, Luke succumbed to “dropsy,” a term used to refer to the medical condition which results in fluid retention, usually related to heart or liver failure. While the story of the Townsend family is more complete than most among Black Putnam County residents, it is still largely absent. Although there are mentions of and a few obituaries for Luke and Charity’s descendants to be found in contemporary newspapers, the digital efforts of a stranger, Susan Turpin Huber, extend one kind of posthumous recognition. Huber not only created a memorial for Luke and other Townsend family members, she also went to the trouble of finding Luke’s obituary from an 1870 newspaper,

 

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Acts like Huber’s preserve and promote memory, which is so essential to human meaning. Over a century later, Luke Townsend’s obituary becomes more than just a record of his death. It is an act of his loved ones’ efforts to remember in a landscape that offered few such recognitions for Black lives.

 

In preserving his passing, Huber has restored a memory of Luke’s life to modern residents. The fact that Luke Townsend’s life was remembered in public print while others remain nameless or buried under lichen-covered headstones is an exception to an official historical memory, in Indiana and beyond, that is often less about who lived and more about who was allowed to be remembered. In this way, restored memories can become a defiant form of meaning-making by resisting the silence of archives, the erasure of time, and the fragility of human life; it is not just about the past, but about how we choose to live with the traces of others and how we choose to document the memory of those who came before us.

 

What Remains of the Townsends Today

 

Though the Townsends’ original homes are gone, a single summer kitchen that was once part of the Townsend Inn still stands in Putnamville. Built by James Townsend in 1828, the inn likely housed not only him, but Luke and Charity Townsend, their ten children, Tom Townsend, Grandmother Sibley, Aunt Hetty, Aunt Amy, and Yaller Ann. The summer kitchen building was nearly lost to time, falling into disrepair until the summer of 2017, when local residents Susan and Lee Stewart intervened. Their effort was modest in scope, Lee Stewart remarked, “Was there a big, long plan? The plan was, ‘I can save that.’ That’s as far as it went.” (Jernagan). The Stewarts’ modest act was a profoundly human one, a refusal to let the physical traces of Black history quietly vanish into oblivion.

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The Townsend/Layman Museum, aka The Summer Kitchen, offers a wide variety of free guided tours. Call 765-721-6980 to book a tour with the museum’s curator, Susan Huber. Open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday, 1st and 3rd Saturdays 11 a.m.–3 p.m. Closed November–March.

 

The Stewarts created a tangible anchor to the memory of lives otherwise reduced, for the most part, to numbers on official archival records. Then-assistant editor for the Banner Graphic Jared Jernagan captured the power of the Stewarts’ decision to preserve the summer kitchen when he wrote that “Touching the bricks put [Lee] Stewart in contact with…freed slaves [who] built Townsend’s inn as well as their own quarters and summer kitchen.” Susan and Lee Stewart did manage to save the historic Townsend summer kitchen. After receiving the help of the Indiana Department of Correction in restoring the structure, the Stewarts were aided in the restoration project by four teams of workers from the Putnam County Jail (Jernagan). The summer kitchen is now part of the Indiana Historical Society and is protected as a historical landmark. The act of touching, restoring, and preserving becomes a form of remembrance—not just of structures, but of the people whose labor and lives would otherwise be invisible to current residents. In a world where so many Black voices were silent or silenced, this surviving kitchen becomes more than a building, it becomes a memory object, proof that someone was there, that they mattered, that they shaped the land.

 

McKenna Jones teaches English at South Putnam High School. In August 2025, she finished a Master of Arts degree in English at the University of Southern Indiana.

Works Cited

Ancestry. “Luke Enos Townsend Sr.” LegacyofKimDavisPolk, accessed 11 July 2025, https://www.ancestry.com/search/categories/usfedcen/.

Ancestry. “U.S. Federal Census Collection.” 1820–1870, https://www.ancestry.com/search/categories/usfedcen/.
 

Chekanov, Vsevolod Iu. “Unraveling the Threads of Microhistory: Exploring Key Features and Notable Examples.” Journal of History, vol. 59, no. 1, Apr. 2024, pp. 68–81. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.3138/jh-2023-0045.

Cooper, Arnold. “Plenty Good Room: Bethel A.M.E. Church of Greencastle, Indiana, 1872–1890.” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 84, no. 1, 1999, pp. 101–11. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2649087. Accessed 3 May 2025.

Gaiman, Neil, American Gods. William Morrow, 2001.

Ginzburg, Carlo. "Carlo Ginzburg: 'In History as in Cinema, Every Close-up Implies an Off-screen Scene.'" Verso, 9 June 2023, translated by David Fernbach. Originally published in Le Monde des livres, 2 Oct. 2022. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/5536-carlo-ginzburg-in-history-as-in-cinema-every-close-up-implies-an-off-screen- scene?srsltid=AfmBOoqlvIiaS09mUj0sIaR4oa60AX YUM-n6wK2hl6jI2EHkXuH4TJ_d.

Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins. “The Soul.” Forest Leaves, 1840–1851.

Huber, Susan Turpin. “Luke Enos ‘Uncle Luke’ Townsend,” 1810–Sep 1870, Find a Grave, Memorial ID 130236394, Putnamville Cemetery, Putnamville, Putnam County, Indiana, USA, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/130236394/
luke-townsend. Luke Townsend’s obituary originally published in Greencastle Banner, 29 Sept. 1870, Putnam County, Indiana.
 

"List of Indiana Emigrants to Liberia." Indiana Historical Bureau. https://www.in.gov/history/for-educators/download-issues-of-the-indiana-historian/indian a-emigrants-to-liberia/list-of-indiana-emigrants-to-liberia/.

Jernagan, Jared. “Townsend/Layman Museum Provides Link to Early History of Putnamville.” Banner Graphic, 23 Oct. 2018, Greencastle, Putnam County, Indiana, https://www.suncommercial.com/banner_graphic/archives/article_438d4568-14ba-57b1-a f44-1464aa4bf0a6.html.

"Putnam County." Indiana State Library. Updated in 2025. https://www.in.gov/library/collections-and-services/genealogy/indiana-
county-research-guides/putnam-county/#:~:text=Putnam%20County%20was%20created%20in,The%20co
unty%20seat%20is%20Greencastle.

“Putnamville Offenders Recreate History in Rehabilitation of Townsend Inn.” Banner Graphic, 25 Sept. 2018, Greencastle, Putnam County, Indiana, https://www.suncommercial.com/banner_graphic/archives/article_0cd65311-0d59-5a43-b 93e-ff7c3425e0a2.html. Staff Writers. “Former Residents Likely in Liberia: Several from Greencastle Emigrated to Republic Years Ago.” The Daily Banner, Hoosier State Chronicles Newspaper Database, 31 July 1937, p. 2., Greencastle, Putnam County, Indiana. https://newspapers.library.in.gov.
 

Weik, Jesse William. Weik's History of Putnam County, Indiana, 1857–1930. B.F. Bowen, 1910. Archive.org, https://archive.org/details/weikshistoryofpu00weik/page/200/mode/2 up?q=%22Luke+ Townsend%22.