Jonathan Lindley (1756–1828) was an 18th-century member of the North Carolina legislature, land speculator, and one of the original settlers of Orange County, Indiana.
Jonathan's brother James, who was twenty years older and had settled in upcountry South Carolina, served as a prominent Loyalist militia captain.
[5] As a Quaker with anti-slavery convictions, Lindley introduced several bills to curb slavery, one of which called for an end to the importation of slaves from Africa to North Carolina, a crucial first step toward abolition.
Indiana Territory attracted many Southerners, in large part due to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which radically simplified land titles and helped owners secure a clear legal hold on their property.
He purchased large tracts of land along the Wabash River in present-day Parke County and initially intended to establish a Quaker colony near Fort Harrison, just north of the future site of Terre Haute.
Zachariah Lindley had established a grist mill on Lick Creek, in the limestone uplands forty miles northwest of Louisville, near what became Paoli, Indiana.
At least eleven of these families were "free colored," descendants of Africans and Lumbee, a Native American tribe in southeastern North Carolina.
Originally intending to settle in the Wabash Valley, Lindley's settlers (numbering 218 people) were turned back by the outbreak of conflict between Tecumseh's Shawnee Confederation and the Indiana militia led by Territorial Governor William Henry Harrison.
(Lick Creek itself was apparently named for a tributary of the Haw River near the old Lindley Mill in Chatham County, North Carolina.
Many of the free black settlers who moved north with him settled farther back away from the Chambersburg Road, in a remote part of what became the Hoosier National Forest.