Every historic building has a story to tell
In 1901, a new flour and feed mill opened on East Buford Street in Lancaster, Kentucky. It was just about two blocks from the courthouse and the square of commercial buildings, and adjacent to the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, in what was then a “thriving section of town.”* The mill is still standing, and last (read more)
Category: Garrard County
Tags: #africanamericanhistory, #flourmill, #garrardmills, #lancasterky, #rollermills
The congregation of the Greater Liberty Baptist Church dates to around 1882, when several members of the Main Street Baptist Church, an African American church founded in 1862, left to form their own church. The new congregation built a church on Corral Street, but as the church membership swelled, the church moved again and again. (read more)
In the years following the Civil War, churches served as the focal point of many African American communities. The church was not only a place for worship and prayer, but a foundation for forging a stronger community that included education and the preservation of cultural identity. Sometimes the church and the school occupied the same (read more)
The African Methodist Episcopal Church (also known as the Colored Methodist Church, or CME) has deep roots in Winchester, Kentucky. Prior to the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, worship was celebrated in the basement of the local Methodist Church, but by 1866, the congregation purchased their first parcel for building. Allen Chapel CME Church was (read more)
You miss so much viewing the world from a car. I’ve driven down North Limestone Street in Lexington hundreds of times – but what you glimpse through the windows of a car is different, in a hundred small ways, from what you observe while on foot. And it was on foot, trudging through a January (read more)
Categories: African American History, Fayette County
Tags: #africanamericanhistory, #AfricanCemeteryNo2, #shotgunhouse
I am a big fan of the public library system in the United States (or, “li-berry” as I pronounced it as a child). Reading is integral to my existence, and wherever I’ve lived or visited, I seek out the local library. Andrew Carnegie – or rather, the Carnegie Foundation of New York – helped fund (read more)
When the cornerstone was laid for what is now Shiloh Baptist Church in 1923, it was proclaimed “one of the city’s most handsome edifices.” The stately, Beaux Arts/classical style church, built in a yellow brick, was the long-awaited dream of the Fifth Street Baptist Church, which had begun as a satellite branch of First Baptist (read more)
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