Founded in the late 1840s by brothers Joshua and Sanford Lyles, formerly enslaved men from Tennessee, Lyles Station grew into one of Indiana's most successful Black farming settlements, reaching roughly 800 residents at its peak between 1880 and 1912 with its own post office, churches, and school. Devastating flooding in 1913 triggered a long decline, but Lyles Station remains the only one of Indiana's historic Black rural settlements still inhabited by descendants of its original founders. The restored 1919 Lyles Consolidated School now operates as a museum, and the community was featured in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture's 2016 Power of Place exhibition on Black rural life in the Midwest.