Stories of Salem: The Sundown Town
- Jacob Dufour | Publisher
- Apr 2
- 4 min read
SPONSORSHIP NOTE: Stories of Salem is made possible through the assistance and resources of the John Hay Center, located at 307 E. Market Street in Salem. Open Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 10 to 5, they are an invaluable source of information for anyone interested in the history of their hometown. Learn more at johnhaycenter.org!
"The only town in Indiana where negroes are not allowed to live", the Richmond Daily Palladium said of Salem in 1898. Whether this specific distinction is in fact true or not, one thing is certain: for approximately 100 years (the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s), no Black people lived in Salem.
Things weren't always that way. Prior to the Civil War, hundreds of free Black people resided in Washington County and many more thousands throughout Indiana, as Indiana itself was never a slave state. Everything changed in the early 1860s, however, as the not-so-"secret" society known as the Knights of the Golden Circle came to Salem.
The Knights of the Golden Circle, or the KGC, were an extremist paramilitary group whose aim was to create a new country known as the Golden Circle. The Golden Circle would be centered in Havana, and consist of the entirety of the Confederate States, Mexico (which was to be divided into 25 new additional slave states), Central America, northern parts of South America, Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and most of the other islands in the Caribbean. The primary purpose of the Golden Circle? Essentially, to create more slave states and irreversibly increase enslavers' political and economic power.
In Northern states such as Indiana, groups of Southern sympathizers during the Civil War organized themselves into a splinter group of the KGC called "The Order of the Sons of Liberty". Many towns in Indiana had their own chapters of the Sons of Liberty, and Salem was no exception. The KGC leader of Salem was none other than Horace Heffren, an editor of The Washington Democrat (renamed The Salem Democrat in 1874), who frequently used the publication as a platform to speak out against the Republican Party, President Lincoln, and the idea of extending constitutional rights to Blacks.
In one of Heffren's many tirades, published January 1st, 1863 (the day the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect), he stated, "This is the day that Abraham Lincoln is to proclaim all the negroes free in the rebelling states. Such an act is a violation of the constitution, without warrant or form of law."
On the 31st of the same month, he wrote: "we denounce and condemn the proclamation of the President in taking negroes as soldiers or marines, and that the present bill before Congress, which makes negroes brigadiers or major-generals, and allows them to command white soldiers, is a damnable act of abolition, a disgrace to humanity and the age in which we live" (Source: Indianapolis News, December 25th, 1901).
As the KGC grew in Washington County, anti-Black sentiment grew with it. In 1864, a blacksmith by the name of "Black John" Williams (named "Black John" to distinguish him from a white man named John Williams who also lived in Washington County) was found shot dead in the doorway of his own home. By the end of the Civil War, Salem was quickly becoming a "Sundown Town" - a name given to communities in which Black people were either forced by ordinance or intimidation to leave town "before sundown".
According to the Indiana Historical Society, the last Black resident of Salem was Alexander White, who was murdered by two masked assailants as he was leaving church one day in 1867. One of the killers escaped, while the other was arrested, tried, and found not guilty, despite the murder being witnessed firsthand by White's fellow parishioners. Whether Alexander was in fact the last Black person living in Salem or not (other sources claim that he was not), he was inarguably one of the last. By 1880 at the latest, Salem was fully a Sundown Town, and it would be over a century before Black people were recorded in the town's census again.
The Knights of the Golden Circle no longer exist. By the end of the Civil War, the KGC's plans for a new country where slavery could be perpetually legal had fizzled out. In its place came a new group who didn't intend to create a new country, but rather focused simply on promoting the "values" of their predecessors in this country: The Ku Klux Klan. And although it was well before my time, if you ask an older resident of Salem, chances are they'll remember seeing the Klan around town many decades ago.
When I decided to write Stories of Salem, I knew not all of the stories would be easy or fun to tell. Sometimes, history is just undeniably and irredeemably terrible. But we can't change history, and we can't fix it, and it's not our place to anyway. The responsibility for the actions committed throughout history died with the people who committed them.
Our duty is simply to learn that history, and do what we can to make a better future.
I remember growing up my parents talked about Salem being a sundown town. They weren't in agreement and raised us to respect all people. Salem has come a LONG WAY!
Thanks, coming from Louisville I was unaware of this part of Salem’s history.