2020 Award: Robert Bell
Bell identified African American Union Soldiers from Oldham County. After completion of his research, 126 soldiers were identified and included their: Muster-in sites, slaveholders, dates of service, full names, and estimated birth dates. This information has been incorporated into educational programs at the history center. In particular the data is now part of the Mount Parlor Tour Room designated by the National Park Service on Underground Railroad Network in 2016. The exhibit discusses the process of enslavement in LaGrange and they way it operated Oldham County government prior to the Civil War. The sheer volume of these soldiers reveals the resistance, risks and courage of enslaved people in the county.
2021 Award: Morris Mount Roberts Archaeology Field School
This award supported the K&S Cultural Resources to oversee the Bibb Escapes/Gatewood Plantation Archaeology Field School. K&S are the licensed archaeologists who oversee this archaeology program for the Oldham County History Center. Research has been conducted on this site since 2005. In 2016 the research was used to nominate the site on the National Park Service National Underground Railroad Network.
Awarded to U of L graduate student, Rebecca Wishnevski. Rebecca identified and digitized Oldham County Court Records that contained slave transactions, holdings and other related cases. The vast collection housed in the Barnett Library & Archives is an ongoing project that continues with volunteers. In addition, funds were used to support the summer Morris Mount Roberts Archaeology Field School.
Coleson was an honors history undergraduate student from Bellarmine University. Coleson researched and compiled the nomination form to the National Park Service to nominate the Historic African American Cemetery in LaGrange to the National Underground Railroad Network. This nomination is still ongoing. Currently the history center is investigating the ownership of the cemetery whose Board of Trustees has not been active for over 100 years.
This award supported the K&S Cultural Resources to officially close the Bibb Escapes/Gatewood Plantation site after a 17 year archaeology program at the site. A report was compiled of the that as a part of Doug VonStrohe’s Masters Thesis: Investigation of Subsurface Features at 15TM35: The Bibb Escapes/Gatewood Plantation Site, Dept of Archaeology, Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park.
In 2020 the Oldham County History Center received the Morris Mount Roberts Family Fellowship through a gift from LaGrange native, Ruth Roberts. This $10,000 Fellowship is directed toward African American studies and local history in LaGrange and Oldham County. Ruth Roberts explained her interest in supporting local African American research and programs in the following:
Ancestors of the Morris Mount Roberts family arrived in this country in the 1600’s, as early settlers primarily in Virginia. By the late 1700’s and early 1800’s many had migrated to Kentucky. As a child I was fascinated with this history while growing up in La Grange in the middle 20th century with my two sisters and three brothers. We all enjoyed the strong sense of community of a small southern town on the edge of a large city with activities in church, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, 4-H Club and various other clubs at Oldham County High School. Riding horses with the neighbors in the summer, going to the county fair in August and attending basketball games in the winter rounded out the year.
My parents, Bessie Morris Mount Roberts and P.C. Roberts, were born and grew up in La Grange, graduated in the same class from La Grange High School in 1935, and lived in the town their whole lives except for several years during WWII. With many relatives throughout the town and surrounding area, my mother said when she was a child she was kin to three-fourths of the people in town, including the Ballards, Berrys, Taylors, Mallorys and more. She was descended from John Mount, the Civil War jailor who built the Archive building for his home about 1840, and Rob Morris, the Masonic poet and founder of the Order of the Eastern Star who settled here in 1860. My father through his mother, Mary June Henderson Roberts, was descended from Richard Henderson, a Virginia lawyer who hired Daniel Boone in the 1770’s to take settlers on the Wilderness Trail through the Cumberland Gap into the land that would become Kentucky. He planned to buy it from native tribes and turn it into a state called Transylvania.
History lessons began early for me. When my sisters Mary Alice, Susan and I were small, before my brothers were born, my grandfather, Rob Morris Mount, walked with us holding hands to Sunday School at the Christian Church and then onto Head’s Drug Store on Main Street for a soda. We sat at a display table with attached, swing-out seats, like the one displayed in the Archive Building today. Pop, as we called him, was born in the Mount house now called the Archive Building in 1878. Until he was ten years old, he and his grandfather, Rob Morris, would walk through La Grange’s downtown to what is now the Rob Morris Home. His grandfather would talk about the Masonic symbol on the Fortitude Lodge sign at the corner of Main Street. Pop showed me a picture of Rob Morris in a Masonic Bible and I explained that he was a writer. Pop with a large bald head and soft eyes looked like pictures of patriarchs in my Sunday School books. When Pop died in 1949 when I was four, I combined all these bits and pieces together and thought he had gone to heaven to be with his grandfather and write more Bible stories.
These were just a few of the relatives and their stories from La Grange my family knew when we were children. I relished the stories about the explorers, the land speculators, the farmers, the civic leaders, the suffragettes, and finally the poet, world traveler, and Masonic educator in our family tree and elaborated on them to create a rich sense of heritage. Knowing my ancestors and their struggles, challenges, failures and triumphs give me a stronger sense of who I am. After all, since I share DNA with these people who created and lived through this history, I have a greater confidence that what has come before me in some way contributes to me and provides me a certain security in this world.
History is always a combination of people and the times and places where they lived. It is also an evolving story as more information is discovered. About 15 years ago, a new box of pre-Civil War documents was found in an attic in another town by a descendent of the James Mount family. This box, called “Grandma Railey’s box” after Amanda Railey Mount, contained Civil War letters written from battle sites by a Union soldier, Amos Mount, to his stepmother Amanda Mount. The box was sent to the Archive Center, originally the Mount home where they were received during that war. Inside the box mixed in with the letters were runaway slave advertisements and letters related to the slave trade that James Mount as sheriff was involved in.
Today there is a historical marker about my family’s ancestors in front of the Archive building that describes their involvement in the slave trade. Letters and documents that reveal details of their lives and other research has led to a designation for the Mount house as a site on the National Registry of Underground Railroad, tying local history to a larger understanding of our country’s history.
To round out this history of primarily early white settlers, the museum has begun to actively research local African American ancestry, to tell more of the history of all the people who settled and worked to create this town and community. Since few records have been kept of African Americans, special effort is needed to research their historical contributions. To pursue this research, we have created the Morris Mount Roberts Family Fellowship.
Knowing our ancestry has given my family a stronger sense of who we are, and we want to support a similar enhancement in the lives of the whole Oldham County community. The history of African Americans in La Grange is part of the history of our town and my family.
As I have learned about my own family, history is never complete. Each era contributes more. Now is the time to recover more of the history of the people, African American and white, who made the town of La Grange and the surrounding community what it is. This is what inspired me to establish a family fellowship for research in African American genealogy.
When I read one of the letters in Grandma Railey’s box about a failed slave sale involving a woman named Anarchy, I was inspired to tell an imagined, fictionalized story of Anarchy, her owners John and Amanda Mount, and the recently arrived Rob Morris and his wife Charlotte. Set in 1860, a year before the Civil War began, the novel describes the impact of the Underground Railroad and the pre-Civil War years on their lives. Letters, documents, and writings are a rich resource for all the main characters except Anarchy. One mention of her name in a letter is all we currently know. Through research provided by the Fellowship into African Americans from this era, I hope to discover more about Anarchy and others like her.
In my career I’ve taught English and literature in public schools in Louisville, and in community colleges and universities in Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia and Texas. For the last 30 years, I have been a medical writer, publisher and website entrepreneur, specializing in medical devices in diabetes—pumps, CGMs, and the closed loop artificial pancreas. During this time I have also written fiction. My novel about 1860 La Grange and the Underground Railroad called Anarchy and the Freemason is in revision and will be published in 2021.
Kentucky was one of the northern most slave states but never seceded from the Union during the Civil War. Records (Collins, 1882, p. 261) indicate the population of Oldham County had 4,815 whites and 2,431 slaves in 1860 prior to the onset of the Civil War.
The system of slavery in Oldham County was a robust business for landowners whose successes would have been impossible without this labor force. Top dollar for a young male enslaved adult in 1850 would be $1,200 equivalent in purchasing power today of $48,000. The system of slavery added a profitable tax addition to the counties infrastructure and court system. Slave trafficking was an investment that benefitted local infrastructures because slaves were taxed along with a person’s assets like land, livestock, etc.
Many enslaved people in Oldham County were transplanted to the county by slaveholding families from Virginia who had received large land grants and pensions awarded for Revolutionary War service. The higher the ranking officers the larger the land grants, most of which were passed down through sons and grandsons or sold to prominent families. The enslaved laborers cleared the farms, plowed the fields, and served the household.
The Harrods Creek Burial Grounds is located on land that was part of a large land grant distributed to the Henshaw family from Virginia and serves as a typical example of the use of slave laborers to establish farms in Oldham County.
Who were the Henshaws?
Hermitage Farm, located in Goshen, was created and expanded from a 1,330 acre land grant purchased by Captain John Henshaw of Essex County , Va., from General Hugh Mercer after the Revolutionary War. One of Captain Henshaw’s children, John Henshaw of Orange County, Va., inherited this parcel of land and gave 1,000 acres each to his sons, Philip Telfair Henshaw and James Henshaw. These parcels adjoined each other. Phillip Telfair Henshaw created Hermitage Farm.
Philip Telfair Henshaw (1800-1835) married Sarah Ann Scott (1802-1862) on July 24, 1824. They moved to Kentucky and built the present house named “Hermitage” from 1832-1835. No other family but the Henshaws and their descendants lived on the farm until it was sold in 1936 to Warner Jones who made it a profitable thoroughbred horse farm operation. The farm has been divided into large parcels today, and the back parcel, now owned by Eleanor Bingham Miller, contains the Harrods Creek Farm Burial Ground.
The Hermitage farmhouse was begun in 1832 and completed in 1836. The work during the last year was chiefly elaborate woodwork. The furniture was all done by hand by a cabinetmaker at Brownsboro named Burkett Carden. The more plain furniture pieces were made by him at the house, but the turned pieces (the dining table, high tables, some of the beds, a bureau) were made in his shop in Brownsboro where he had his turning lathe. Most of the furniture was made of wild cherry that grew right on the plantation.
The corners of the house were set in the cardinal points of the compass/ The parlor is in the north corner, the sitting room in the west corner, the father’s room in the south corner, a little room in the east corner, so the front door faces directly northwest. The house was built by 30 slaves which Sarah Ann Scott had brought with her from Orange County, Virginia. The oversight of the erection of the house was in the hands of Mr. Carder. Just before the completion of the Hermitage home, Philip and Sarah Ann made a visit to Capt. Henshaw’s home in Virginia. At that time Philip contracted typhoid fever and died. Sarah Ann Scott returned to Hermitage a widow and with their 3 children. Sarah Ann was accompanied by her brother, Garrett, when she returned with the children, to Hermitage after Philip died. The three children of Philip and Sarah Ann were: Sarah Ann Elizabeth Henshaw (1825-1902), John Scott Henshaw (1827-1883) and Lucy Mary Jane Henshaw (1831-1899).
Slaveholding and the Henshaw Family
Census and tax records indicate both Sarah Ann Henshaw along with her brother-in-law, James Henshaw, (adjoining property owner), had large slave holdings. Sarah’s records show a between 20 and 30 laborers listed on Census records between 1840 leading up to the Civil War. James Henshaw records average between 30 and 40 enslaved people, and on the 1860 census indicate all males on the census, between the ages of 20 and 30 years old. This would be an expensive holding that implies active trading. A nearby landowner, Ralph Tarlton, has been identified in archives records and from written records of past local historian Lucien Rule, as an active slave trader. Other census records of surrounding landowners (Barbours, Clores, Adams, Berry, Taylor, Snowdens and others) show a large amount of slaveholdings that vary starting at 10 and upwards to 40 enslaved laborers on these farms.
A Hidden History
Eleanor Bingham Miller indicated the Harrods Creek Farm Burial Grounds were hidden in a large, overgrown thicket of trees, shrubs and weeds. The area where the burial ground is located is surrounded by large crops soybeans, corn and hemp. The open fields are used as a training area for equestrian events and it was noted that horses would stop when approaching the thicket area, attempting to avoid the area altogether. It was enough of a problem that riders began training away from the site.
One of Eleanor’s children investigated the thicket more thoroughly and noticed stones hidden among the brush, that seemed to be placed intentionally. Eleanor hired archaeologist Phil Diblasi from the University of Louisville to bring his students and conduct an archaeology survey of the site.
On May 14, 2013 an Archaeology Site Form was registered as 150L with the Office of State Archaeology with following comments:
The site does not meet the criteria for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. It is a simple cemetery with approximately 25, simple unmarked limestone headstones and foot stones. It is believed to be a slave cemetery. The area is covered with vinca minor (graveyard ivy). There are a few trees present. All the trees are less than 50 years old. The surrounding area is presently used for agricultural purposes.
The cemetery is circumscribed by the remnants of a wagon/buggy road. The road is clearly visible on the south, west and portions of the northwest side. The road is vaguely traceable on the east and southeast sides.
The surface manifestation of the cemetery appears undisturbed and only modified on the east and southeast margins, due to agricultural activity. The condition of human remains and associated material culture are, at present, unknown. The exact number of graves is unknown. The period of use is unknown but assumed to be prior to 1864.
Following directions of the archaeologist Phil DiBlasi, property owner Eleanor Bingham Miller had the burial site cleared and trees were felled. Remaining tree stumps were injected with mushroom mycelium to destroy the tree stumps.
Harrods Creek Farm Burial Site Today
The injection of mycelium on the tree trunks caused decomposition and the site is now cleared. The small gravestones are easily visible along with many more depressions on the site, indicating more burials are possible. The landowner planted a series of Juniper virginianis (Cedar) trees around the circular wagon roadbed, which helped to define the grounds. In 2020 the Oldham County History Center entered into a partnership with landowner Eleanor Bingham Miller to help preserve, protect and develop education and research on this burial site. The Oldham County History Center leads tours to the site on an annual basis. Several public programs have been held at the farm including the Slave Dwelling Project presented by Joseph McGill, Jr.
In 2023 the Oldham County History Center honored Eleanor Bingham Miller as the Champion of Oldham County History. The history center placed a limestone cut stone, taken from the first courthouse jail, located at Westport at the burial grounds. A prayer, composed by Ms. Bingham Miller about the burial site, was engraved on a bronze plaque, placed on the limestone block, at what is believed to be the entrance of the burial grounds.
Future activities include:
*Nomination of the site to the National Park Service African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act
*Continued research on farms, geneaology records, slave court records and stories related to enslavement in the vicinity and about the Henshaw family
*Continued educational programs and events at the site
*Ground imaging to help identify burials
The following is on the memorial plaque at the burial site:
A Prayer for Healing and Forgiveness
On behalf of my family and my neighbor land owners we gratefully acknowledge we stand on land inhabited by native peoples for millennia.
We stand on land cleared and made productive for generations through the relentless exploitation of enslaved peoples.
We do not turn away from the roots of what made us here today.
We hereby declare our commitment to make the promise of Truth and Reconciliation real in this community.
If we have the courage and bravery that matches that of the ones who were here before, our souls and our nation will be healed.
And though we do not know their names, today we honor the spirits of those buried here and now departed to return to the Sky and to their Makers.
Amen
Eleanor Bingham Miller
Sept. 16, 2021
Harrods Creek Farm Burial Grounds Prayer
Eleanor Bingham Miller
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