A remark from a mother to her faraway daughter lit the spark that led to Crawfordsville’s newest historical marker. Imogene Elmore told her daughter, Vicke Elmore Hudson Swisher, then living in Oregon, that their church, Bethel AME in Crawfordsville, “was started by an 8‑year‑old enslaved girl.” That girl was Mariah Gates (later Patterson), whose parents were likely sold so that Mariah and her brother Isaac could be brought north for a future freer than the one in their birth state, Kentucky. They had to be “sponsored” in Indiana, a status not unlike being indentured.
That comment fueled Swisher’s heart for history and eventually pulled her back home to uncover the intertwined histories of Bethel AME, Black education in Crawfordsville, and the Lincoln School for Colored Children.
A question that sent her back to the bus
Years before there was a marker or a book, there was a moment on a history trip when Swisher realized that the story of schools like the one her father, Fran Elmore, attended simply wasn’t being told. Touring the Indiana State Normal School (now Indiana State University), she scanned the photographs and displays. She saw nothing that reflected Lincoln School or the Black children and families she knew. Overwhelmed, she walked away from the exhibits and went back to the bus in tears.
That is where educator and public historian Tamara “Tammy” Hemmerlein found her. When Swisher explained why she was upset that Black people in Crawfordsville “didn’t have a story” in the official record, Hemmerlein made a promise: “I will help you tell your story.” That simple commitment sparked links that have led to two decades of collaborative research into Bethel AME, the Lincoln School, and the families whose lives were shaped by both.
Meeting a “History Sister”
In the late 1990s or early 2000s, Swisher and Hemmerlein attended an Underground Railroad history conference in Indianapolis. While Swisher and Hemmerlein were eating lunch together, Shannon Hudson, who taught Swisher’s children, asked if she could join them. In addition to teaching science to middle schoolers, Hudson had long been a history wonk. She’s written books on the Underground Railroad in Indiana and Dr. Mary Holloway Wilhite.
The connection was immediate. Swisher and Hudson quickly began calling one another “history sisters.” That lunchtime invitation grew into a 20‑plus‑year partnership in research, teaching, public programming, and, eventually, in writing “To Remember the Forgotten School: Lincoln School for Colored Children” and securing an Indiana state historical marker.
The League of Women Voters provided funding and support for their research, as well as Eunice Trotter of Indiana Landmarks, and Wabash College.
From Bethel’s overcrowded classroom to Lincoln School
The marker dedicated on June 20, 2026, stands at Lincoln Park, where the second Lincoln School once served Black children in Crawfordsville. But as Swisher and Hudson’s research shows, its story begins decades earlier inside Bethel AME.
By the 1850s, Bethel AME was operating a school for Black children in a tiny space that could reasonably hold about 25 students; at one point, records indicate that roughly 126 children were crammed into it. When Indiana law and local pressure made it impossible to ignore this inequity, Crawfordsville school trustees began renting space in a Presbyterian church to educate Black students, but that building too quickly burst at the seams.
In 1881, the trustees authorized the city’s first all‑Black public school, and in September 1882, the first Lincoln School for Colored Children opened at Spring and North Walnut on the “northside,” in a largely Black neighborhood. With about 42 students at the start, Lincoln School became both an educational anchor and a community center, hosting classrooms, gatherings and celebrations for generations.
As enrollment grew and segregation hardened, Crawfordsville renovated the original Lincoln School into Horace Mann Elementary and built the new Lincoln School building, which operated from 1936 to 1947, when local schools were finally integrated; in 1952, the building was converted into a recreation center under the Parks and Recreation Department.
Readers who want to follow this arc more deeply, from Bethel AME’s first cramped classroom to rented church rooms, to the first Lincoln School on Spring and North Walnut, to the second building on Wabash and the era of Horace Mann, can explore the resources at the Crawfordsville District Public Library, the League of Women Voters of Montgomery County’s June 2022 column “Remembering the Forgotten School,” listen to the June 17 Crawfordsville Connection or read Swisher and Hudson’s book.
A park and a marker
On Juneteenth 2026, beside a sea of green pickleball courts dotted with blue playing “pools” at Lincoln Park, the sharp pop‑pop of balls echoed as more than 100 people gathered for the city’s Juneteenth celebration and historical marker dedication.
Fawn Johnson, director of Crawfordsville Parks and Recreation, welcomed the crowd, and Councilman Jeff Lucas read Mayor Todd Barton’s proclamation, tying the national story of Juneteenth to the local story of Black education in Crawfordsville. Then, with family members, former students, and community leaders looking on, Swisher and Lincoln School alumnus and entrepreneur Jerry Norvell—founder of Norvell’s Barbeque, which also served lunch that day—helped dedicate the marker that had been more than five years in the making. The program honored Swisher’s father, Fran Elmore, who was among the final students at Lincoln School and had been eagerly looking forward to the event before his recent passing.
The story matters more than ever
The Lincoln School marker is hopefully the first culmination of Swisher and Hudson’s long friendship. They’re working on a marker and historical designation for Bethel AME, and they continue to uncover histories that need to be told. As Mark Twain mused, “History does not repeat, but it often rhymes.” Hudson and Swisher are filling in the gaps that speak to a past when diversity, equity and inclusion were treated as vices rather than virtues.
The research journey has not been easy; both Swisher and Hudson describe encountering documents and stories that made their “blood boil” and brought them to tears as they confronted the daily indignities and structural barriers faced by Black families in Crawfordsville. After becoming a community center well-loved by the once thriving “East End,” Beech Street neighborhood, Lincoln School was demolished in 1981, at 99 years old. All that is left of the neighborhood, which was once home to Civil War Vet Robert Hopkins, is a decaying sidewalk.
Yet, as Hudson has reflected, the hardest parts of the work are also the most rewarding. For her, the Lincoln School story is about parents and grandparents who refused to be pushed aside and who did “what was best for their babies,” even when it meant fighting for basic educational rights. Remembering this history, she suggests, is not about dwelling on pain for its own sake; it is about honoring resilience, telling the truth so that the community knows “where we are now,” and inspiring future generations to keep pushing for a fuller, more honest story of what Crawfordsville has been—and what it still can become.