The Bluegrass and Beyond

The Rev. London Ferrill spent much of his life serving as a bridge between Lexington’s black and white communities. Now, almost 156 years after his death, he is doing it again.

Ferrill may have been the most famous man in Lexington you’ve probably never heard of. Born into slavery in Virginia in 1789 and later freed, he was an influential preacher in the black community here. His funeral procession of nearly 5,000 people was the second-largest the city had ever seen, after Henry Clay’s two years earlier.

The Episcopal Church has invited First African Baptist Church to services Saturday honoring the memory of Ferrill, the only black man buried in the Old Episcopal Burying Ground on East Third Street.

The Most Rev. Katherine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of the national Episcopal Church, will be among the speakers at the 1:30 p.m. service at Christ Church Cathedral on Market Street.

Choirs from local Episcopal churches and First African Baptist will perform, and the program will include a new composition that John Linker, Good Shepherd Episcopal Church’s organist and choirmaster, wrote to accompany the text of a prayer attributed to Ferrill.

Ministers will dedicate the plaque for a monument honoring Ferrill that will be placed in the cemetery later this year. And Ferrill’s broken tombstone formally will be given to First African Baptist, where it has been on display for two decades.

These and other efforts to commemorate Ferrill are an attempt at reconciliation, said Robert Voll, a member of Christ Church who oversees the cemetery.

“I commend the Episcopal Church for doing this,” said the Rev. Nathl Moore, pastor of First African Baptist. “Whenever we can build bridges, it’s a positive thing.”

When he was 9, the woman who owned Ferrill died and he was sold to Col. Samuel Overton for $600. At age 11, Ferrill (sometimes spelled Ferrell) almost drowned in a river, and that was said to have led to a religious conversion. He gained his freedom after Overton’s death and moved with his wife Rodah in about 1815 to Lexington, where Overton had relatives.

Ferrill was trained as a carpenter and, despite little formal education, developed a reputation as a fine preacher. He assisted and later succeeded Peter Durrett, known as “Old Captain,” who in 1790 had started the first African church west of the Allegheny Mountains.

Shortly before Durrett died in 1823, Lexington’s city trustees appointed Ferrill as the official preacher to the black community. Soon afterward, the Elkhorn Baptist Association, a group of Southern Baptist churches in central Kentucky, admitted First African Church into its fold.

White leaders were nervous about Lexington’s growing black population, most of whom were slaves, and they apparently saw Ferrill as someone they could trust. When a rival black preacher tried to force him out of state under a law that prohibited free blacks born outside Kentucky from staying here for more than 30 days, Lexington leaders persuaded the General Assembly to give Ferrill an exemption.

In June 1833, a few months after the Episcopal cemetery was created, a cholera epidemic swept Lexington. The disease killed 500 of the city’s 7,000 residents, including Ferrill’s wife. He was one of three ministers who stayed in town to bury the dead and comfort survivors, black and white.

After the epidemic, Ferrill’s stature in Lexington grew with his church. First African Baptist was the largest church in Kentucky by 1850, with more than 1,800 members. From 1833 until it moved to Price Road in 1987, the church occupied a sanctuary that still stands at the corner of Short and Dewees streets.

Ferrill is said to have baptized 5,000 people and performed hundreds of marriages, using the vows “until death or distance do us part” in the case of slaves who might be separated by sale.

Ferrill died of a heart attack in 1854 and was buried in the all-white Episcopal cemetery.

The Rev. L.H. McIntyre, retired pastor of First African Baptist, said he has done a lot of research on Ferrill and suspects that his father was white, which could help explain his acceptance by white leaders. No images or descriptions of him are known to exist.

“London Ferrill was a force for unity, a force for connecting the black and white communities of Lexington,” Voll said. But amid the intense racism that swept Kentucky in the decades after the Civil War, his role was largely forgotten.

After The Lexington Cemetery was established in 1849, the Old Episcopal Burying Ground with its Victorian groundskeeper’s cottage was neglected. The cemetery became an island, separated from the predominantly black neighborhood that surrounded it by a tall iron fence and locked gates.

Nobody knows exactly where in the cemetery Ferrill was buried. His grave and headstone were separated by the time a portion of the cemetery thought to have been unused was sold to the city in the 1980s for the widening and extension of Rose Street, now Elm Tree Lane.

McIntyre said a groundskeeper let him take Ferrill’s tombstone from a pile of broken, misplaced stones. “I wasn’t trying to steal it, just keep it from being lost,” he said. Christ Church didn’t seek the tombstone’s return.

“They’ve taken better care of it than we ever have,” Voll said.

Voll, a retired Ashland Inc. human resources executive, began overseeing the old cemetery four years ago. One of his goals has been to improve the church’s relationship with both the neighborhood and the African American community.

That led to the planned monument to Ferrill as well as a state historic marker for the cemetery.

It also led Christ Church to allow adjacent land it acquired in 2000 to become a community vegetable garden in 2008.

Moore, the pastor of First African Baptist, said his congregation appreciates the Episcopal Church’s initiative. And he is even more impressed by the church allowing its land to become the London Ferrill Community Garden.

“It’s good we can worship together,” Moore said. “But the community needs us to do more than worship together. It needs us to work together.”

It never fails: Gerald Smith goes to a community to speak about the Kentucky African American Encyclopedia project, and he leaves having learned something unexpected.

People bring old photographs, documents and newspaper clippings to show him. They tell him tales about local history. They even drive him to hidden slave cemeteries and show him little museums, public library archives and memorabilia collections he never knew existed.

“There is a tremendous amount of interest and enthusiasm for this project,” said Smith, below right, a University of Kentucky history professor and one of the encyclopedia’s three general editors.

Along with famous people such as Muhammad Ali and many African-American firsts, the encyclopedia will document fascinating lives that few people know about.

For example, Margaret Garner, a slave born in Boone County in 1833, was the inspiration for Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved. And Joe Simons, a Fleming County slave, was known for his ability to read the Bible upside down. (The woman who owned him read the Bible aloud while he stood at her feet fanning flies; that’s how he taught himself to read.)

Although slavery and the civil rights movement have been well documented, little has been written about many aspects of the parallel universe of black life in Kentucky before integration.

Owensboro’s black citizens organized the Negro Chautauqua in 1907 to provide intellectual stimulation and religious education. There were black newspapers such as the Baptist Monitor, and baseball teams such as the Owingsville Giants of the 1920s and Lawrenceburg Athletic Club of the 1950s.

“African-Americans had their own world,” Smith said. “There were people, places and events of distinction that shaped not only their lives, but the history of Kentucky.”

The encyclopedia is an effort to verify and record much of that history — and to serve as a springboard for further research and writing that will lead to greater cultural understanding.

But like many worthwhile projects in this economic downturn, the encyclopedia is threatened by lack of funding. As Black History Month began, the encyclopedia’s publication date was pushed from 2011 to 2013, and “if we don’t have $30,000 by Aug. 1, it’s pretty much over,” Smith said.

Since the project began two years ago, it has received strong support from University of Kentucky President Lee T. Todd Jr. and smaller contributions from several other Kentucky colleges, universities and foundations, said Stephen Wrinn, director of University Press of Kentucky, which is publishing the encyclopedia. Smith said that, after giving speeches about the project, he often receives small donations from people in the audience.

Like the Encyclopedia of Northern Kentucky, published last year, this book will cost about $700,000 in cash and in-kind support to produce. Only about half of that has been raised.

Wrinn said the project needs a private individual or two to step up and champion a fund-raising campaign, as Mike Hammons and Alice Sparks did for the Northern Kentucky book.

“Gerald and the others have done a good job of getting it up and running,” Wrinn said, and the fund-raising is being co ordinated by the press’s Thomas D. Clark Foundation. “I’m confident we’re going to do it.”

Wrinn said he isn’t aware of an African-American encyclopedia for any other state. The Kentucky Encyclopedia, published in 1992, was a pioneer, too; many states have since done their own. “This is an opportunity for Kentucky to again be a leader,” he said.

So far, 1,271 entries have been chosen for the Kentucky African American Encyclopedia, and 242 have been completed. Several hundred more have been assigned, and Smith is looking for volunteers to join the approximately 80 writers on the project. For more information, go to www.uky.edu/kaae.

Editing the book with Smith are history professors Karen C. McDaniel of Eastern Kentucky University and John A. Hardin of Western Kentucky University. They and other historians are writing 14 topical essays on issues including civil rights, education, religion and women.

Graduate students in history are doing much of the research and verification, and most of the project’s funds go to pay them.

“It will fill many of the gaps in Kentucky history, and in the history of the South as well,” Smith said of the encyclopedia. “I have met some of the nicest people around the state. One thing I’ve learned about Kentuckians is that they love and appreciate their history.”

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.