Friday, December 30, 2005
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Slaveholder's farm unearthed
PRE-CIVIL WAR SITE ON NEW U.S. 68 ROUTE By Greg Kocher, CENTRAL KENTUCKY BUREAU
NICHOLASVILLE - Preparations for a new four-lane road in Jessamine County led to an archaeological dig that is shedding new light on a pre-Civil War slaveholder. AMEC Earth and Environmental, a contractor with offices in Louisville and Lexington, hopes to finish work this week at the site off U.S. 68. Since August, a crew for the firm has dug up the remains of a small plantation house, two slave houses, and two brick-making kilns that probably date back to the late 1830s and early 1840s. The dig is west of Nicholasville on the Henry Knight farm about a mile south of the Ky. 169 intersection with U.S. 68. A new four-lane U.S. 68 is scheduled to be built through the site between 2007 and 2009. The site in a large cow pasture is significant because it has been relatively undisturbed, said Wayna Roach, an archaeologist with the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. "It's one in a million, really," Roach said. "We don't get this type of history often. Most of Kentucky has been plowed, and a plow would take this kind of stuff right out, and so the preservation is beautiful. "I actually hate to see it go. I wish we could pick it up and put it somewhere else and let folks come see it." Instead, AMEC Earth and Environmental has a $250,000 contract to dig up the site, collect whatever artifacts it can find, and photograph and record data for future use. Those actions serve as the mitigation allowed by the federal law for historic properties. The two-room house was owned by Mason Barkley, a hemp farmer who owned about 25 slaves, said Susan Andrews, project manager for AMEC Earth and Environmental. The dig has peeled back earth to find evidence of a stone hearth where there was once a chimney. Bigger stones are pier stones where wood members were laid. Another structure revealed by the dig is a detached kitchen and slave house from the 1840s. There is evidence of a stone cellar, and you can still see the stone steps that went down into the cellar. Around the time of the Civil War, the shed was demolished and the cellar was filled, and a kitchen with a chimney was built onto the main house, Andrews said. The site also has the remains of two kilns where clay bricks were made. Bricks were found in straight, neat rows. Clay and water would be mixed and then the bricks would be formed by hand, Andrews said. They were thoroughly dried, stacked and then covered by a clay chamber. Then they would be burned for three days, and after the fire died down, the bricks were allowed to cool. "A lot of big farms would make their own bricks," Andrews said. She is aware of only two similar kilns being dug up in the state. Household artifacts have been found at the Jessamine site as well. "We've found beads and jewelry, some of the things that have fallen through the floor," Andrews said. "We found pierced brass disks, which is something found a lot near houses occupied by slaves. We found hand-formed pipes, smoking pipes, lots of smoking pipes, actually. "We've found broken dishes and glasses and bottles and buttons. In that cellar we found a huge part of a bone that might have been an ox. They must have had oxen up here and slaughtered one." The site might add more information about slaves in Kentucky, Andrews said. "There's not much known about how slaves actually lived, especially in the Upland south of Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia, because they lived differently than down South, where they had hundreds of slaves living on a plantation. Slaves didn't write, and most of the history was written by well-to-do white men, and you get a certain bias with well-to-do white men." The Jessamine site had been known since the 1990s, but state officials didn't know what it would reveal until an environmental evaluation this past summer. "We sent crews out here to survey it," said Phil Logsdon, environmental coordinator for the state Department of Highway's District 7 Office in Lexington. "They do shovel tests every 20 meters, and when they did that, they started finding these historic artifacts, so they knew something was here. We realized it had a lot of intact deposits, ... and that it had a enough integrity to tell a story about the past." Despite the artifacts gleaned from the site, the new road will still come through the property, state officials said. A new $20 million four-lane road will be built from just south of Southland Christian Church to just north of the Y intersection of U.S. 68 and Ky. 29 near Wilmore. Project Manager Keith Caudill said the District 7 Office is in the process of getting an appraiser to evaluate properties along the intended route for the new four-lane road. "We're hoping by the spring of 2006 to start the right-of-way acquisition process," Caudill said. The appraiser will meet with each affected property owner. Later the district will send out buyers to make offers on the properties. Plans also are being made for relocation of utilities. Bids will be let in May 2007 and completion is anticipated for 2009, weather permitting. Parts of the existing two-lane U.S. 68 will remain as a service road and a bike path. The artifacts collected from the site will probably be kept by the University of Kentucky, Andrews said, and some artifacts might even go on display in the future.
Reach Greg Kocher in the Nicholasville bureau at (859) 885-5775 or gkocher1@herald-leader.com.
Recalling the record of black education
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Denver cemetery's data "very valuable" to state
Monday, December 19, 2005
Report Calls 1898 N.C. Riot an Insurrection
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Long Time Evansville Educator Dies
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Mr. East Akron was local crusader
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Former slaves from Kentucky help found historic Kansas town
Saturday, December 10, 2005
DNA used to trace African lineage
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Clayton chapel has place in history
By Elizabeth Redden, Delaware State News CLAYTON — The bell tower has long been torn down and no peal rings through the sky to welcome old parishioners home. Inside, the light blue-green paint used to cover the trim has begun to peel in places, with scrapes of the church’s old wooden gut peeking out from its walls. The wood floor is covered by well-worn, off-white linoleum tile that wasn’t in place when the structure was built in 1896. The original stamped tin ceiling is hidden beneath layers of tile, the central altar is missing and wooden kitchen chairs are lined in rows where pews once sat. But for Phil Voshell of Smyrna, who grew up attending St. Joseph’s Church in Clayton, moving from baptized baby to altar boy to groom before the same altar, the stained-glass windows still sparkle the same way. Moving back to Smyrna last year after 38 years away, his first visit to the church he was married in 49 years ago filled him with memories and the sense that “it’s basically the same.” Mr. Voshell is serving as chair of a project to renovate the former St. Joseph’s Church, a site that holds a special role in the state’s religious and racial history. Formally inducted into the National Register of Historic Places in 2003, the church, now known as St. Katherine’s Chapel, was built by the Josephite Order as part of a boarding school for blacks from Boston to Baltimore who came to Clayton to learn industrial and agricultural trades. Robin Bodo, historian at the Delaware Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs, said Josephite Father John DeRuyter developed the school on 400 acres purchased by the future saint, Katherine M. Drexel. Ms. Bodo said the Josephite Order was founded in the 1870s to evangelize to freed slaves. At the St. Joseph’s Industrial School, which opened in 1896 with 25 students and had a peak enrollment of 117 students in 1937, blacks received education and were first encouraged to enter the priesthood and then the brotherhood when the former goal became too controversial, Ms. Bodo said. Meanwhile, Smyrna’s St. Polycarp parish, formed in 1883, was without a home after it sold its building on Mount Vernon Street in 1916, said the Rev. Thomas A. Flowers, St. Polycarp’s priest. The plan was to build a new church in Clayton, but world wars and the Great Depression delayed those plans and for 52 years the Smyrna-Clayton Catholic community was welcomed to attend church at the school’s chapel. Mr. Voshell said there was not much interaction between the towns and the school’s black students. The students generally attended church services at different times than the 125 parishioners Mr. Voshell estimated comprised the St. Polycarp’s congregation in the middle of the century. Even in an era of segregation the presence of the school promised hints of a better time. The swimming hole on the back of the school’s property was the meeting place for all of the kids from the school and from the town, Mr. Voshell remembered. “Coldest water you’d ever want to swim in,” he said. The St. Polycarp parish, now comprised of 575 households, continued using the St. Joseph’s Church as its worship space until 1968, when the current church in Smyrna was built, Father Flowers said. The school closed in the 1970s and its buildings languished in relative disuse. The Josephites maintained the property through the rest of the century before St. Joseph’s at Providence Creek finalized its purchase of the land in 2003. St. Joseph’s at Providence Creek, a charitable organization that provides a venue for community service, is now leading a fund-raising drive for the church’s renovation, said Marc C. Ostroff, the group’s executive director. He couldn’t estimate how much the project would cost, saying the group is still in the beginning stages and has not gotten expert opinions on what work needs to be done. Mr. Ostroff said the church is structurally sound, with a new roof and boiler. The group, he said, hopes to restore the building to what it looked like during the first part of 20th century. The foundation has not raised any money for the project, but Mr. Ostroff is confident it will find financial backers. He said he’s not sure what the community would use the space for once renovated — perhaps a spot for weddings, certainly a tourist stop, maybe a place for appropriate lectures or musical presentations. One thing he said it wouldn’t be is a fully functional church. Students at Providence Creek Academy, the charter school based on St. Joseph’s land, have occasionally used the chapel. Their crayoned drawings are taped to its walls, brightly lit by the sunshine filtering through the patterns on the stained glass windows. For the rest of the community, the church has stood virtually unused, but not forgotten. Beneath a three-arched stone gateway etched with “St. Joseph’s Industrial School,” the chapel stands as a monument at the end of Clayton Road. Its sophisticated Italianate architecture makes it virtually one-of-a-kind in a state where smaller, more “vernacular” Methodist churches, as Ms. Bodo said, are found on many corners. “It’s a place of serenity,” said Lorraine Goodman, program director of Middletown Main Street Inc. and co-chair of the chapel renovation committee. The school and its church are, Mr. Voshell said, among the three most important things in the small town of Clayton’s history, joining the railroad, which led to the town’s founding, and the former Wheatley’s Cannery. The combined populations of Smyrna and Clayton climbed by 17.2 percent, from 6,952 to 8,147, from 2000 to 2004. As the two towns propel themselves into the future, the significance of the church without a bell takes on even greater meaning for some who have their roots there. “The way that the whole area is expanding and growing, any time that you can keep a little bit of the history and keep some of the sameness of the community, that’s a good thing,” said Joyce Webber, chair of the board of St. Joseph’s at Providence Creek. “I don’t think the people who’ve moved here understand what went on or how important it was to this town,” Mr. Voshell added.
Post comments on this issue at newszapforums.com/forum47 Staff writer Elizabeth Redden can be reached at 741-8247 or eredden@newszap.com