I personally can't find anything in a few minutes of searching, but I did find a way to contact the Putnam County Historical Society. Perhaps you should give them a call.

It could be that those other 27 Black Putnamians picked up and left town during the Great Migration, the first part of which lasted from the 1910s through the Great Depression. Over a million African Americans moved north or west during this period (See James Gregory's "The Second Great Migration," in African American Urban History, ed. Joe Trotter et al.) Migrants relocated for a variety of reasons: to escape the daily oppression of the Jim Crow South, to earn relatively attractive industrial wages, and to remain employed following widespread agricultural mechanization in the midst a declining farm economy. Of course, life in urban America imposed its own forms of oppression. Residential segregation shunted most Blacks to the parts of town you probably wouldn't voluntarily visit throughout this period, and employment discrimination often confined them to the most dangerous or menial jobs. This demographic shift stalled during the nationwide Depression but picked up again after World War II until deindustrialization and other factors converged to tarnish the image of American cities for a generation.

Try asking for the microfiche of the newspapers from this period at the largest public library in the country. If no one here can answer this very local question, original research may be your best bet.