Roberts Chapel

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.

From the record

“Roberts Chapel, is a non-denominational church that was originally built in 1847 at Roberts Settlement, one of Indiana's early black pioneer communities. The rural church, whose main building dates from 1858, is located near the present-day town of Atlanta in rural Jackson Township, Hamilton County, Indiana.”
Wikipedia article Roberts Chapel (Atlanta, Indiana), CC BY-SA 4.0.

One of 31 National Register listings published here for Hamilton County · listed in 1996 · category: Building.

Sources: the Wikipedia article · the case file at the National Archives · the National Register database, National Park Service · the Wikipedia article

The listing

What is counted as historic. The nomination lists 3 buildingss, 1 site as contributing to the listing.
Address. 3102 E. 276th St., Atlanta, 46031
When was it listed? September 1996
Category. building
Township. Jackson township
National Register reference number. 96001009 - the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.

The ground it stands on

6,516 words

The chapter on Jackson Township in History of Hamilton County Indiana, published 1915 names Atlanta. This is what it says, exactly as the scans read.

In 1836 Michael Shiel came to the county and settled near the present site of Atlanta. Allen Sumner and George Tucker settled near the Shiel cabin on the opposite side of the line later followed by the Lake Erie & Western railway. Later comers included James Thompson, Alexander Smith, John Ehrman, Frederick Smelce and Caleb Sparger. Sparger's land joined Shiel's on the west. Later both Sparger and Shiel laid out a town, calling them, respectively, Spargerville and Shielville, which towns later were merged into one called Buena Vista, and which at present is called Atlanta. Other settlers included the following: Phillip Roads, Peter Miller, Daniel Smith, Daniel and William Haskett, John Harrington, John and Jacob Crull, George Hives and Jacob Whistler.

Passage source: History of Hamilton County Indiana, published 1915.

Jackson township is unique in one respect, as it has within its limits more towns and settlements than any other township in Hamilton county. Cicero, Arcadia and Atlanta are about equal distance apart, along the eastern part of the township, with Deming, a village in the southwestern part, and the Roberts settlement slightly northwest of the center of the township.

Passage source: History of Hamilton County Indiana, published 1915.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

Read the whole chapter on Jackson Township - 6,516 words on its settlement, mills, schools and churches.

Storms near this property

5 since 2004

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The National Weather Service names Atlanta, the town this property stands in, in 5 storm reports between 2004 and 2024: 2 tornado, 2 hail, 1 thunderstorm wind. No death or injury is recorded in these reports. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date opens the federal record of that event.

When	Event	Place named	Harm	What the report says
May 2004	Tornado (F0)	Atlanta	$150,000	An F0 tornado damaged a barn and some farm equipment as it briefly touched down near Atlanta.
July 2024	Thunderstorm Wind	Atlanta	$100,000	Thunderstorm winds produced a 2-mile path of downed trees and tree limbs, including a barn damaged near Atlanta, before a tree was snapped in Cicero.
November 2013	Tornado (EF1)	Atlanta	$40,000	At 1605EST, this EF-1 tornado touched down a half mile south-southwest of Atlanta. The tornado tracked through the town of Atlanta, producing damage to structures in town. At 1607EST, the tornado path crossed into south-central Tipton County and ended to the east of Cicero Creek, just north of the Hamilton-Tipton County line at 1608EST.
June 2006	Hail	Atlanta	-	No property damage reported.
May 2016	Hail	Atlanta	-	no account filed

Every storm recorded in Hamilton County

Map coverage status

No historic map-sheet match is published for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary. Browse the county's mapped places while that work is pending.

Listed places nearby

5 within 8 miles

Other National Register properties close enough to walk or drive between, ordered by distance from this one. Both positions come from the same geocoding pass that matched these properties to their map sheets.

Property	Distance	Listed
Micajah Walden House	1.0 miles	2019
Roads Hotel	5.0 miles	1987
George Boxley Cabin	6.7 miles	2005
Davenport-Bradfield House	6.7 miles	1985
Sheridan Downtown Commercial Historic District	6.8 miles	2007

Sources for this property

National Archives record	The nomination case file for reference 96001009 in Record Group 79.
Wikipedia article	Community-written account of this property, licensed CC BY-SA.
Hamilton County	All 31 listed properties in this county.

Provenance

Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.