On a sunny Saturday afternoon, Sioux Finney leads a small tour of the Huntertown Community Interpretive Park, which is dotted with 19 signs telling tales of the people who once lived there. Nan Wakefield, a UK history student who’s part of the team bringing the African American hamlet back to life, asks Finney a key question.
“If Huntertown was here until just, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, like, why are all the houses gone?”
“Everybody had wells that lived here. And what happens is in the wetland, and now that we've done this work with UK, we know that the water table in a lot of places is just six to eight inches below the surface. So when people started to put in septic tanks in the 60s, 70s and 80s, they would not perk well, because it was a wetland, so the water became contaminated, the groundwater became contaminated.”
Finney’s deep dive into Huntertown began in 2015 when she picked it as a project for her 9th grade social studies class. She retired three years later – leaving her extra time for Huntertown. Finney says groundwater contamination and flooding worsened after state Transportation officials picked Huntertown for a stretch of the Bluegrass Parkway. After buyouts with federal block grant development funds in 2001 and 2005, the last residents of Huntertown were gone by 2010.
On this day, several have returned. Glenn Jackson is 71. He and two younger brothers came to their grandparent’s farm in Huntertown in the summer.
‘It's historical because it was all black community. And the fact that the matter was, when we was all coming up, everybody was closely knit. The families and the friends was close knit. And I said I really hated to see when the housing stuff started going down and then they started moving things out. Because I felt like it was always a place to come to visit.”
For nearly 140 years, it was also a place to live – just east of Versailles and about 10 miles west of Lexington. In 1871, former slave and U.S. Colored Troops soldier Jerry Gatewood purchased a five-acre tract from Isham Railey, of the Hunter family, for 34 mules and $5. According to the park’s website, the people of Huntertown built grocery stores, a school that served as a church, and cheered on hometown baseball teams like the Huntertown Sluggers. The Riney B Railroad stopped there, twice a day.
On sign dedication day, UK Landscape Architecture professors discuss the master plan they and their students devised for the park, and the interpretative signage. There’s also a bioswale area with native plants and trees designed to reduce flooding.
Huntertown has been incorporated into the Versailles-Woodford County Parks and Recreation Department, and Parks Board Chair Jon Gay salutes the people who’re bringing it back.
“It would have been easy to forget, it would have been easy to do nothing. It was easy to let Bluegrass Parkway and time erode away every memory in this community. But the Huntertown Parks Board did the opposite of that and all the community leaders that came in with their group.”
Historian Brenda Jackson, who grew up in Huntertown, reads a poem she wrote called “3,4,5: Keeping Huntertown Alive” – a reference to the payment of 34 mules and $5 for the property.
“Huntertown was a close-knit community, over 130 years of thriving for unity. Now a 38-acre community interpretive park, enjoy this historic site and help to make its mark. So many prominent people came from Huntertown. I have only named a few. Add your own line to this poem of people and events that are due from you.”
The official ceremonies conclude with a ribbon-cutting, and Huntertown’s oldest former resident, 93-year-old Josephine Carr, offers a few words of her own.
“Huntertown, I played, I lived, I had a good time. And I was the last one to leave Huntertown. And I was the first one to sign for them to have Huntertown. So I moved to Versailles and that's where I reside now. The Lord has been with me and he said he would with me til the end. The end hasn’t come yet.”
I’m John McGary, in Huntertown.
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