Rae Ferguson is on a mission.

Exactly.

What she will find is part of the puzzle she's trying to solve.

Recently, Ferguson was given the opportunity to trek across southeastern Indiana in search of an almost invisible past.

She works for the Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana, and her job is to discover and document the evaporating African-American heritage in southeastern Indiana.

I'm a historian.

I'm a graduate student.

And I'm finishing my dissertation this year.

And I've been doing research into Indiana history, black communities in Indiana for about the last eight years.

And drive up and down all these country roads.

And I talk to people in churches and I go in areas like the first time I went and Jeff, I didn't know anybody.

I pulled two men off a garbage truck because they were black, startled them to death.

That's.

Excuse me.

I told them what I'm here to do.

Ask them for people they can tell me to.

They gave me three women's names.

The minister's name.

Hi.

Ferguson's research is deemed very important.

The historian's constant vigil brings her face to face with the keepers of an almost 100% oral tradition.

I had been out to Greenville with Mrs..

I don't think that our history, the history of African-Americans has really been given its due in the state of Indiana for all the contributions that people have made.

Every time I go so many places and people tell me, there were no blacks in Rush County, we were never concerned about that.

But you go and there may be 23 people in a census this year, and you talk to those 23 people and they remember somebody saying something about there were people over there.

Every place there were communities here, they were black people.

Ferguson's efforts have not gone unrewarded.

Revealed in her archives of Pictures and Facts is a tale of African-American institutions and people.

Here there are two unrecognized.

There's the St Paul's Church right down on Fifth Street here in Madison.

That was Peter Booth's church came over in the 1850s.

I haven't done the formal research yet, but I think it's in the 1850s from Kentucky and his first church in Indiana was here and it's still down there.

The building is being used as a garage.

You can see the stone up there.

This is Saint Paul, you know.

You know, church.

Ferguson's research also highlights this one room schoolhouse in Hanover, Indiana, that's still standing there.

And it was a one room schoolhouse.

People have given me photographs from when they were children there, and they're in their eighties now.

You know, pictures of the school, the site of the school and classes, one through eight with the school teachers there, You know, just lovely, lovely photographs that they've shared with me.

Ferguson's painstaking efforts have made an impact.

Recently, he she discovered this old schoolhouse in New Albany, Indiana.

Today, it's used as a maintenance facility for the New Albany School system.

This site is an example of how Ferguson's efforts have made a difference.

I had a meeting at the AME Church in New Albany two weeks ago and I was talking about the project and then I said, What about Division Street School?

You know?

And they were like, yeah, You know, I went there and my mother went there and they showed me photographs and shared stories.

And I said, Yeah, but it's still there.

What do you want to do with it?

You know?

And out of that came a committee that is going to try to get the bodies.

One of the people had already talked to the superintendent of schools, and they're going to try to get him to let them use it as an African-American museum, but also because it's still part of the school system to maybe set up one week a year when first grade classes, second grade, all the grade school classes will go take a history course in there and have it set up so they can be in school like it was in the 1870s.

The house burned down one time.

These days, Ferguson is inspired to keep tracking.

Her research is bringing to life a buried part of Hoosier history.

What I'm about is resurrecting those places, you know, so that even though Gray's Mill isn't there when you drive by, I want a marker there that tells you the families that were there, why they were there, that they had a school, a church, you know, businesses that a veterinarian lived there that went all over, that a midwife delivered 3000 babies in the county, you know, because those were important and they were a part of the fabric of Hoosier life