The Powell Family: Making South Bend Home

Farrow and Rebecca gathered up their belongings, their children, and their hope for the future, setting out northward for South Bend, Indiana. First from North Carolina then to Southern Indiana, they continued on to forge a path of greater opportunity for their family. The year was 1858, and the Powell family became one of the first Black families to settle in South Bend. The Powells were a hugely influential family to the area. They were active in the community, buying multiple properties and using their resources to help establish anchor sites like the Olivet A.M.E. church in 1870. Their home was located on the 400 block of Main Street, one home among a handful of Black homesteads in the burgeoning South Bend. In an oral history interview, Powell family descendant John Charles Bryant described growing up on Main Street: “Main Street was a very rich heritage. All the families were supportive of one another. Nobody went hungry…if somebody needed something, the brothers came together.”

A Changing Community Landscape

Eventually, the neighborhood began to change and Main Street neighbors relocated. “Our house was the last standing house,” Bryant remarked, “all the other relatives had sold their houses.” The Powell family home later sat vacant in the Innwoods parking lot, a lone structural island in a sea of urban development and asphalt that had sprung up around it. Boarded up windows relegated this prominent South Bend structure to slow disappearance, until 1973 when local high school students took up the cause to preserve it. The home was lifted up on the bed of a trailer and relocated to Leeper Park following the students’ activism, making its way through the city streets as a one-house parade.

_{These photographs depict historic Powell House, the oldest remaining black-built house in the city, being moved to Leeper Park from an alley between S. Michigan St. and Main St.}

Carried Forward in Memory and Community

Devastatingly, the Powell home was vandalized repeatedly after its relocation, and was ultimately destroyed by an arsonist’s flames in 1980. But what the home stood for, the intrepid spirit of Black hope and community togetherness, remains. The history that John Charles Bryant shared about his family legacy and the Main Street neighborhood lives on to inspire us to connect with our neighbors, build strong bonds with each other, and work together to construct our hope for the future one story at a time.