Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Buckskin, IN

Buckskin is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Barton Township, Gibson County, in southwestern Indiana, about ten miles southwest of Oakland City.

Buckskin got its name from the old Buckskin Road, the stagecoach route between Boonville and Princeton, where deer hunters hung their buckskin hides along the roadside so the passing stage could collect them for sale — the surrounding hills were once great deer country.

In the early 1850s a young German immigrant named Emil Sasse opened a small store on the road at Buckskin selling groceries, powder and lead, secured the community's post office, and became its first postmaster; his brother Theodore joined him and the Sasse brothers built one of the busiest trading businesses in the county, at one time owning more than 2,000 acres.

Buckskin's post office was established in 1847 and remained in operation for well over a century, until it was discontinued in 1989, and the community keeps its own ZIP code, 47647.

Buckskin was once a coal mining town, but when the mines played out, many of its residents stayed in the Gibson County hills and commuted to jobs in Evansville, Princeton and Fort Branch instead.

The community's German heritage shows in its church: the Buckskin St. John German Evangelical congregation was organized in 1866 and, through later mergers, became St. Johns United Church of Christ, which built a new church in 1960.

Buckskin is a very small place today — a 2007 population figure put it at just 79 residents — and the Census Bureau only delineated it as a census-designated place in the 2022 American Community Survey.

Children in Buckskin and the eastern half of Gibson County are served by the East Gibson School Corporation, and the community observes Central Time, as does its home county, which counted 33,011 residents in the 2020 census with Princeton as the county seat.