The Bluegrass and Beyond

BARDSTOWN — Gerald Smith, a Lexington native and University of Kentucky history professor, had never visited My Old Kentucky Home State Park before last summer.

Smith arrived early for a speaking engagement at the Nelson County Public Library and had a couple of hours to kill. So he and a student decided to take the park’s tour of Federal Hill, the Rowan family mansion where, legend has it, Stephen Collins Foster was inspired to write Kentucky’s state song.

“The people were very nice,” Smith said. But he noticed that the tour guide, dressed in a hoop skirt, kept referring to the “servants.”

“I finally said, ‘You mean the slaves?’” Smith recalled.

The tour didn’t include the mansion’s attic or basement, where slaves lived, or small rooms beside the kitchen, where they worked.

Finally, Smith asked where the slaves were buried. In the cemetery beside the garden? No, the guide said. Out back. Way out back.

Smith and student A.J. Hartsfield walked across a field to a stand of old trees. Underneath, inside a split-rail fence, were 22 small, unmarked stones and a plaque dedicated in 1945 to Judge John Rowan’s “faithful retainers.”

“As we approached the entrance to the little wooden fence, this guy was looking for his golf ball,” Smith said. The cemetery is in the bend of the 13th hole of the park’s golf course. Balls frequently land there.

“There was nothing sacred about it,” Smith said of the slave cemetery. “It was painful. It was sad.”

Smith went home and shared his experience with two other prominent African-Americans, Lexington writer Frank X Walker and Everett McCorvey, the UK Opera Theatre director who has sung My Old Kentucky Home many times in concerts here and overseas.

They decided to approach state officials with a simple message: We must do better. And, with the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games about to focus the world’s attention on Kentucky, we must do it quickly.

“Folks sing the song; it stirs up such emotion,” Smith said. “It celebrates the state’s history and culture and hospitality and traditions. But this is the way we remember the people who built and lived and worked at this symbol, this monument, this shrine to Kentucky. The African-American presence here has been erased.”

Smith, McCorvey and Walker were hardly the first to complain. But their message seems to have been heard — loud and clear.

“We have already taken a number of steps to interpret things better,” said Gerry Van der Meer, the state parks commissioner. “There’s a bit of uncomfortableness, naturally, about slavery. But it’s a fact. It’s a part of history. We’re embracing this.”

Several changes are planned for My Old Kentucky Home. And Van der Meer has ordered a review of how African-American history is interpreted at all state-run parks and historic sites.

Historically, a raw nerve

My Old Kentucky Home, the place and the song, hold special significance, both for Kentucky’s international image and its complex history of race relations.

The mansion is one of Kentucky’s most recognizable landmarks, depicted on both the state’s postage stamp and quarter. It is the state’s most-visited historic site, with more than 55,000 people touring the mansion each year.

My Old Kentucky Home is the most famous song about the state, sung for an international television audience by more than 100,000 people in the Churchill Downs grandstand before the Kentucky Derby each May. But it wasn’t until 1986 that the word “darkies” in the song’s lyrics was officially changed to “people.”

Foster published the song in 1853, as Kentucky was in the cross-hairs of the national debate over slavery that would lead to the Civil War.

While many people love the song for its romanticized view of Kentucky, they rarely sing past the first verse. The complete song, which Foster originally called Poor Uncle Tom, Good Night, is actually about a slave being “sold down the river.”

While researching My Old Kentucky Home, Smith came across a journal article by the late Thomas Clark, Kentucky’s most eminent historian, published in 1936. It discussed parallels between the song and the controversial, anti-slavery novel of Foster’s time, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Many whites have always tried to portray slavery in Kentucky as somehow more humane than in the Deep South, but abolitionists of the 1850s argued just the opposite, Clark wrote. That’s because slavery in Kentucky was more personal.

Plantations were smaller, and Kentucky slaves had more interaction with their owners than in many Southern states. Whippings and runaways were common, and tens of thousands of Kentucky slaves were separated from their families each year and sold in the South for profit as the cotton, sugar and rice industries grew.

“It is significant,” Clark wrote more than 70 years ago, “that the author’s use of a title obscured his context sufficiently to cause Kentuckians, to whom Uncle Tom’s Cabin was anathema, to take the song to their hearts and claim it as their very own.”

For years after state officials opened Federal Hill to tourists in 1923, black men were hired to walk around portraying Foster’s song characters “Old Black Joe” and “Old Uncle Ned.”

“They fit that standard stereotype of the happy servant who was there to welcome the white guests to the mansion,” Smith said.

He sees the 1945 cemetery plaque honoring Rowan’s “faithful retainers” as part of the effort to soften Kentucky’s collective memory.

“If we allow the site to exist the way it is now, then we perpetuate the myth that slavery was a benign institution in Kentucky,” said Smith, who has been working for years on the Kentucky African-American Encyclopedia project. “This is not about compensatory history. It’s just about history.”

Park changes planned

Officials are working on several modifications at My Old Kentucky Home State Park, where the mansion has been meticulously restored and chimes broadcast Foster tunes across the grounds.

Tour guide scripts are being revised to reflect research on slaves at Federal Hill, who numbered from two to 100 at any given time between the 1790s and 1865. Interpretive displays are planned as money becomes available.

Eventually, the park would like to have audio tour equipment to supplement its small guide staff.

Park Director Alice Willett Heaton is seeking an archaeological survey to find cabin foundations and other evidence of where slaves lived and worked. It is thought the cabins were located near the amphitheater where a Stephen Foster musical has been performed since 1958.

Safety and accessibility issues may keep the attic and basement closed to visitors, Heaton said. But there are discussions about converting one of the rooms beside the kitchen into a place to explain slavery at Federal Hill.

Van der Meer said trees will be planted to screen the slave cemetery from the state park system’s most popular golf course.

“Somebody’s family is buried there,” Van der Meer said. “We want that to be treated more respectfully.”

Heaton is looking for money to build a path from the house to the cemetery. The park master plan she developed in 1987 called for the path, as well as moving the 1930s golf course further away from the cemetery.

She got money a few years ago to move a fairway that went between the house and cemetery. But she hasn’t been able to move the other hole, or build the path.

“It’s always been a money issue,” Heaton said. “But I’m thrilled with Dr. Smith’s interest. This could be a real opportunity for us.”

Smith said he has been pleased by the response from state officials. He plans to work with them to make sure changes are made.

Smith said he wants Kentucky’s international image to be positive — but historically accurate. “For me, it’s about telling the rest of the story,” he said. “So far, we’ve only been telling half of it.”

Perhaps enough time has passed, enough progress has been made, that both black and white Kentuckians can begin coming to grips with slavery and a racist past.

“I’m excited about the future,” Smith said. “I’m excited about the cemetery, about the possibilities and ways of including African-American history in that story of My Old Kentucky Home.”

As a historian, Smith acknowledges the difficulty of accurately interpreting African-American history at My Old Kentucky Home. Little physical evidence remains. Records are sketchy, and much is based on oral tradition.

But, he notes, Federal Hill’s very association with Stephen Foster is based on oral tradition among the Rowans, who were the songwriter’s cousins. There’s no written evidence that Foster ever visited the mansion, much less set his song there.

“We know the slaves were there,” Smith said. “But that other fellow, the one they’ve got the statue to out in the garden, we’re not sure about him.”

Click on each photo to enlarge

Sometimes a dream deferred can come true.

You could see that dream in the faces of many of the 200 people who gathered Thursday morning at the corner of East Third Street and Elm Tree Lane to break ground for the long-delayed Lyric Theatre and Cultural Arts Center project.

The crowd included community leaders and city officials, some of whom had worked for 18 years to restore the Lyric, an icon of Lexington’s African American community.

It also included many longtime Lexingtonians who have been waiting 46 years for their Lyric to reopen.

They’ll have another year to wait before the cavernous shell of a theater is rebuilt as a city-owned performing arts and community center.

“It means a number of years of frustration are over,” said Robert Jefferson, a former Urban County Council member who helped start the long crusade. “This is a very emotional time for me.”

After a 1987 fire damaged the Kentucky Theatre on Main Street and the city announced plans to restore it, Jefferson urged then-Mayor Scotty Baesler to appropriate $250,000 for the Lyric.

It was only fair, Jefferson said: “As a native Lexingtonian, I hadn’t had the right to go to the Kentucky Theatre because of segregation.”

But it would take years of struggle and legal disputes before Mayor Jim Newberry, the Urban County Council and a dedicated group of community activists would succeed in putting together the Lyric’s $9 million renovation and operating plan.

Many of those who came out remembered the Lyric as the place where black Lexingtonians came to see movies, vaudeville shows and jazz musicians from 1948 until the theater closed in 1963.

Tassa Wigginton said her childhood Saturdays were spent at the Lyric, visiting with friends, eating popcorn and watching cartoons and movies.

“We came with a quarter; 10 cents to get in and 15 cents to spend,” she said. “One day when I was a teenager my daddy let me come with him to see a stage show and I thought I was in seventh heaven.

“This was really the community center,” Wigginton said. “This and Dunbar High School were the pride of the black community.”

Don Garrison said he began working at the Lyric selling tickets and ended up as its last manager. “I was here the night we shut it down,” he said, noting the irony that desegregation ruined the Lyric’s business.

Julian Jackson Jr., another early supporter of the Lyric’s restoration, said he hopes the new facility will preserve the East End’s colorful history.

Many people know the area was once home to Lexington’s pre-Keeneland race track and the famous black jockeys Isaac Murphy and Jimmy Winkfield. But Jackson said they may not know of other neighborhood greats, such as the opera singer William Ray and the inventor Joseph Bailey Lyons.

As with the Lyric, desegregation led to decline in the historically black East End — a decline that has been in rapid reverse over the past decade, thanks to work by the Urban League, city government and many others.

S.T. Roach, the legendary basketball coach at the old all-black Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, was thrilled to be able to attend Thursday’s ceremony.

“I’ve been waiting for this for many years,” said Roach, 93, who once worked at the Lyric and ran an ice cream bar next door.

Roach recalled the vitality of the old East End and thinks the Lyric’s restoration could kick the neighborhood’s renaissance into high gear.

Former councilman George Brown agreed.

“I think the new Lyric will become a meeting place, a community place, a place for new artists to be discovered,” Brown said. “Who knows what could be spawned here, from Third and Elm Tree Lane? Only the mind can imagine.”

There’s a lot more to Lexington history than Henry Clay, Mary Todd Lincoln and Man o’ War.

Take, for example, the contributions African-Americans have made to the city’s growth and development since the very beginning.

This is a good weekend to learn some of that history, as the east end will be alive with the 20th annual Roots and Heritage Festival.

For a good introduction, consider walking, biking or driving the African American Heritage Trail in downtown Lexington, which includes 10 sites that have been touchstones in the community since the days of slavery.

The Heritage Trail was developed by Doris Wilkinson, a Lexington native who in 1958 became the first African-American woman to earn an undergraduate degree from the University of Kentucky and in 1967 became the first to be hired as a full-time faculty member.

Wilkinson, a sociologist, got the idea for the trail after spending several summers at Harvard University.

“What made Boston and Cambridge stand out was that they had incorporated ethnic diversity and history into their city’s public face,” Wilkinson said. “I thought, what is here that would link the growth and history of Lexington to African-Americans? How can we further facilitate the image of Lexington as a progressive city with a rich ethnic heritage?”

Wilkinson developed the trail and put together a pamphlet in 2000 that was quickly embraced by the Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau. Copies can be downloaded from the bureau’s Web site. Wilkinson hopes to add sites to the trail and encourage its use in education.

African-Americans make up only 13.8 percent of Lexington’s population, according to census figures. But before the Civil War, it was twice that. In 1860, one in four Lexington residents was a slave, and Fayette was one of Kentucky’s largest slave-holding counties.

Lexington also was one of the South’s largest slave markets. Thousands of African-Americans were sold on the block at Cheapside, near the old Fayette County Courthouse. And a whipping post was erected there in 1847, where slaves could be punished for such infractions as disobeying their masters or violating the 7 p.m. curfew.

That history wasn’t acknowledged with a state historical marker until five years ago. Cheapside is one stop on the Heritage Trail. Want to learn more? The 1955 book Lincoln and the Bluegrass by Lexington lawyer William Townsend includes a vivid and well-documented account of the ugliest chapter in Lexington’s history.

Like at Cheapside, nothing but markers remain at some other sites on the trail — the offices of pioneering black physicians on North Broadway, the long-gone pond off Bolivar Street where baptisms were held, and the home of Isaac Murphy, a jockey who won the Kentucky Derby three times.

The same is true of two more sites Wilkinson plans to add to the trail: the Mammoth Insurance Co. on De weese Street, and the former home of Consolidated Baptist Church. The old church on South Upper was recently demolished to make way for a fast-food restaurant.

A marker about the Mammoth Insurance Co. was placed across the street from its former offices at the site of another stop on the trail, the Polk-Dalton Infirmary, where several African-American doctors practiced when Deweese Street was the hub of segregated Lexington’s black community. The infirmary building now houses offices of the Urban League.

The other sites on the Heritage Trail are old African-American churches scattered throughout downtown. They give a sense of the importance of religion in the community, as well as the close proximity in which Lexington’s black and white residents lived and worshiped in the 19th century despite their separate social structures.

“The churches were sort of havens, a refuge from segregation,” Wilkinson said. “That’s why they dominate the trail. They were the major institutions.”

The oldest congregation is Historic Pleasant Green Missionary Baptist Church, which was organized in 1790 by slave Peter Duerett. The church has been at its West Maxwell Street site since 1822.

St. Paul AME church on North Upper was built in 1826, right behind fashionable Gratz Park. The current building is the result of a 1906 remodeling.

Main Street Baptist Church was built in 1870 next door to the house where Mary Todd lived for seven years before she married Abraham Lincoln in 1839. The original church’s cornerstone is part of a wall beside the current sanctuary.

The beautiful East Second Street Christian Church building has stood on Constitution Street since 1880. Another handsome 19th-century building on the trail is the old First Baptist Church sanctuary at the corner of Short and Deweese streets.

Of course, there’s a lot more African-American history beyond downtown.

There are more than a dozen rural black communities in Fayette County such Jimtown, Uttingertown and Bracktown.

There were other notable figures, such as the Chilesburg-born Jimmy Winkfield, one of the early 20th century’s greatest jockeys. He rode for the czar in Russia and retired in France. His fascinating life story was told in the 2006 book Black Maestro, by New York Times racing writer Joe Drape.

If you have a couple of hours free this weekend, the African American Heritage Trail is a good place to start.