Reaping the Harvest

Little is left of the built environment that marked the Greenville-Longtown Black Settlement, a once-thriving, free Black agricultural community on the border of Randolph County, Indiana, and Darke County, Ohio. The people of Greenville have not been forgotten, however, because of the memory-work undertaken by each generation of Black women whose power and agency connects their past with their future descendants. This article draws on “descendant archival practices” as a method to understand the importance of Greenville’s Black women in the preservation of rural Black community heritage and in the writing of Black women’s histories in the antebellum Midwest. Descendant archival practices connect Black digital humanities practices to the Longtown-Greenville descendant community's digitization of artifacts and oral histories and supports a community-owned version of their active Facebook group. The result, a History Harvest called Remembering Freedom: Longtown and Greenville History Harvest, will facilitate ongoing community participation and future history harvests for overlooked, forgotten, and long-silenced communities

Black history · Descendant · Digitization · Documentation · Oral history · Digital and Traditional Archives Management · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis