Eunice Trotter, director of the Black Heritage Program at Indiana Landmarks in Indianapolis, speaks to Brown County Commissioners on Oct. 2, after commissioners formally recognized Juneteenth as a paid holiday for county employees.
In correcting what a county commissioner called a recent mistake, Brown County appears to have made history as the first in Indiana to declare Juneteenth a paid holiday for county employees. And in doing so, new light has been shed on the county’s little-explored Black history.
On Oct. 2, commissioners reversed a recent decision, renaming a new paid holiday for county employees for the Juneteenth federal holiday on which it falls.
Commissioners previously had established June 19, 2025, as “Brown County Employee Appreciation Day,” but that day also is the Juneteenth holiday, which celebrates the official end of slavery in the United States. The day has been observed as a federal holiday since 2021 and marks the occasion when the last slaves were freed in 1865 in Texas, some two years after Emancipation was made the law of the land.
The commissioners’ earlier decision to grant county employees a paid holiday on Juneteenth but call it something else had prompted opposition. Commissioners president Jerry Pitman said during Wednesday’s meeting, “We want to back up and we want to correct that … so I’m going to entertain a motion to alter the holiday calendar … and go back and revise that and put Juneteenth on there as a Brown County recognized holiday.”
Commissioner Ron Sanders made that motion, and in the process offered an apology to about 20 people who attended the meeting.
“I want to say that I personally apologize to anybody that was offended from this,” he said. “…We’re not perfect up here. We make mistakes. And obviously, we made a big one here.”
Commissioners unanimously revised the calendar for next year to observe Juneteenth as a paid holiday — a vote that was applauded by those who attended Wednesday’s meeting.
Among them was Eunice Trotter, director of the Black Heritage Program at Indiana Landmarks in Indianapolis. Trotter said after the meeting she was pleasantly surprised by the commissioners’ reconsideration of marking the Juneteenth holiday.
“I just applaud you, and I thank you,” Trotter told commissioners, later noting that the decision makes Brown County “I believe the first county in Indiana to do this. … That word really should get out because this is really something significant, what you’ve done today.”
After the meeting, Trotter said on her drive from Indianapolis to Nashville, she had no idea commissioners planned to formally recognize Juneteenth.
“It was a pleasant surprise,” she said. “… I had received a call when the discussion took place at the last meeting and was asked to come do some education, so I had no idea they were going to do this.
“… Juneteenth celebrates not only the emancipation of African Americans, but of this nation,” Trotter said. “Thousands of white people were killed over this issue of slavery. … This is a celebration not just for African Americans but for our entire nation.”
During the meeting, Trotter provided a presentation on research into Indiana’s Black heritage — including locally. She said Brown County had at least 23 African American residents in 1840, according to census data.
“Free Blacks arrived in Brown County less than four years after the county was formed, and they probably were here before then,” Trotter said. In her research, she said she discovered that most of those who were in the county in the early 1800s were related to two families — the Warricks and the Manuels, and they were originally from North Carolina. “These families were property-owning families in Brown County,” she said.
But by 1860, there was only one African-American counted in the census in Brown County, she said. And while Indiana from its founding was a free state, the black population in Indiana declined in large part due to state laws passed before the Civil War that drove black people from the state and for a period in the mid-1800s barred then from settling here, Trotter said.
Trotter noted there’s ample evidence of black heritage in Brown County that may not have been recorded in census and official sources, but more research is needed to uncover that history.
“There is huge evidence that Brown County itself was part of an Underground Railroad pathway,” she said. “There’s not been enough research done here. We also know that even later … this community was a go-to spot for many African Americans, including artist John Wesley Hardrick.”
Trotter also encouraged commissioners and county leaders to look further into local black history, which she said could boost tourism and provide grant funding for research into a past that has been little explored.
“That research I mentioned earlier, it’s so critical that it be done,” she said. “… There’s gold in them there hills.”
