Black Hamlets
of the Bluegrass

A Leestown Road community named for the Reverend Frederick Braxton.

Historic Lyric Theatre · artistic interpretation. Fictional people and setting.

Land purchases, church life, and a surviving Rosenwald school anchor Cadentown’s story.

HABS KY-288, photo 3 · July 2004 · Library of Congress

Residents connect Jimtown’s name with Jim Sidener and land bought after slavery.

Historic Lyric Theatre · artistic interpretation. Fictional people and setting.

An urban Black neighborhood across South Limestone from the University of Kentucky.

Sanborn Map Company, 1907, sheet 73 · Library of Congress

The Camp Nelson landscape provides an essential starting point for studying Black refugee life, emancipation, and the communities that followed.

Athens appears in rural settlement and Black hamlet research inventories; the specific Black community’s origins remain unverified.

Avon belongs in the Fayette County research inventory, with the limits of the evidence stated.

Local memory identifies Boston and the Bottom in Georgetown. Archival records offer leads, but the neighborhood’s precise boundaries remain to be established.

Beers & Lanagan, Map of Scott County, 1879 · Library of Congress

Centerville is one of three distinct, closely linked eastern Fayette settlements.

Coletown belongs in the Fayette County research inventory, with the limits of the evidence stated.

Columbus is part of the adjoining Royster Road settlement landscape.

Reform, Slickaway, and Fort Spring connect several eras of one settlement’s history.

A community founded by a formerly enslaved veteran is remembered today through a park, oral histories, and the work of former residents.

Jonestown Lane preserves the name of a community changed by suburban development.

A Black community on Parkers Mill Road, beside a landscape transformed by the airport.

Families bought small lots from Samuel Maddox and built lives alongside Bluegrass farms.

Mitchelltown appears in the modern hamlet research inventory; its founders, first land purchases, and institutional history remain unverified.

Muir Station appears in the modern hamlet research inventory; its individual founding history remains unverified.

Calvin Hamilton and Primus Keene turned a land purchase into a community with space for homes, a school, a church, and a shared well.

Nihizertown is one of three distinct, closely linked eastern Fayette settlements.

Local historian Harry Enoch traces an 1867 subdivision and the African American buyers whose deeds illuminate family life and landownership.

Pricetown is one of three distinct, closely linked eastern Fayette settlements.

South Elkhorn belongs in the Fayette County research inventory, with the limits of the evidence stated.

Uttingertown is part of the adjoining Royster Road settlement landscape.

Warrentown belongs in the Fayette County research inventory, with the limits of the evidence stated.

Established in 1924 through a Jackson-family farm subdivision, the settlement was first called Stevenson Subdivision; its road became known as Willow Lane.

Once known as South Elkhorn Bend and Lenerson, Zion Hill sustained churches, stores, a post office, and a school.