Posted on Sat, May. 17, 2008

Garden is fertile ground for reconciliation

Empty lot is fertile ground for seeds of reconciliation

By Amy Wilson

awilson1@herald-leader.com

David Wagoner, left, and Isaac Maddock, 4, sowed seeds last month at the London Ferrill Community Garden, next to the Old Episcopal Burying Ground on East Third Street. Ferrill was a long-overlooked black clergyman who served Lexington in the mid-1800s. Photo by Whitney Waters | staff

IF YOU GO

London Ferrill Community Garden dedication

When: Saturday, May 17, 2 p.m.

Where: East Third Street, between Old Episcopal Burying Ground and fire station.

Brief words and blessings from Christ Church Rector, the Very Rev. Morris K. Thompson Jr. and First African Baptist Church's the Rev. L.H. McIntyre. A reception following at the cottage at the burying grounds.

For more information on London Ferrill's life, go to www.docsouth.unc.edu/neh/ferrill/ferrill.html.

Upon his death in 1854, London Ferrill was buried on East Third Street in the Episcopal Burying Ground's rector's plot. He was not the rector at Lexington's influential and powerful Christ Church, nor had he ever been.

Heavens, Ferrill had spent his whole life as a Baptist.

But he was unquestionably an extraordinary man of faith, having given over his life to God at age 11, having overcome physical and social obstacles to gather his own church flock until it numbered 1,800 and having lived a life worthy enough to draw 4,500 mourners to the funeral of a poor but pious man.

If one earns such a thing, Ferrill earned his place in that beautifully shaded cemetery. He was only one of three Lexington clergymen who had determined to stay behind to minister to the dying during the merciless cholera epidemic of 1833. He had lost his wife early to the disease but remained, knowing of the pain of loss.

He founded a church here, led many to God in his years here, baptized 220 at one meeting alone. He worked in public education, ministered equally to white and black Kentuckians.

And yet his name is remembered by almost no one in this town. There is no statuary to his bravery and goodness; no headstone marking the place where we might remember his work and his words.

There are lots of reasons why that might be. But one reason is probably the most obvious.

London Ferrill was black.

Geoff and Sherry Maddock live in the neighborhood where the Old Episcopal Burying Ground stands surrounded by a fence. Next to the cemetery, a wide open field abuts a fire station to the west. Across the street, a clinic, houses, apartments.

It's a neighborhood in urban Lexington.

The Maddocks, missionaries by trade and parents to a four-year-old, walk past the open field every day. They used to wonder who owned it and if they would be willing to talk about putting it to good use again.

Like, wouldn't they like to see it planted in fresh corn and tomatoes? Green beans and squash? How about sunflowers and snap peas?

They live in the city. Their neighbors live in the city. Hard to find a big enough plot and sunlight for growing vegetables.

Hungry children here like everywhere could use the nourishment this ground could offer. This is a perfect example, a wonderful opportunity for something called food justice. Right here.

And wouldn't the neighbors — the gentrifiers and the never-lefts — welcome a little earth-turning, picnic-basket sharing hello time?

So Sherry Maddock asked around. She was directed to Bob Voll, the property manager and general all-around guy who knows everything at Christ Church (including about the old burying ground). She was told the church owned the land. She pitched her idea about a community garden.

He loved it. He loved it for a lot of reasons. Here was a chance for Christ Church, he said, to right some wrongs. To reach back to the black community in which its white-only burying ground survived and bridge a gap.

Soon enough, Martin Luther King Neighborhood Association was involved in the planning. So, too, St. Andrews Episcopal Church.

In each case, Voll felt old wounds — some reaching as far back as 1870 — could be mended. Some, as fresh as a decade ago, could be addressed.

Each of the issues tended to have a racial component. Did Christ Church members ask their former slaves to leave the church upon Emancipation? Or did they leave voluntarily, even happily, to create their own churches?

Was the white cemetery off-limits to the black community? Was the black community insulted by the presence of the white-only plot in their midst? Was the white church purposefully non-responsive to the needs of the black churches in the area? Was there ugliness among God's people? Was un-Christianlike behavior all-around?

Answer yes to any of that and the garden is necessary.

Voll called it ”reconciliation.“

Let us therefore get busy planting seeds.

First, the land had to be scoured by University of Kentucky archeologist Nancy O'Malley and high-tech remote sensing equipment to see what was under the land in question. (The land, now seemingly open, was fully or partially used as a Catholic burial ground from before 1812 through 1875, at which time many of the tombstones and bodies were removed to the Calvary Cemetery.)

It is very likely bodies are still in the ground there, says O'Malley, but she has OK'd the ground work for gardening. The land itself is dark and rich, moist and friable, easily tillable despite all the wet weather this spring.

With the help of SeedLeaf, a non-profit organization that helps create, install and maintain community gardens, broccoli, cabbage, kale and spinach went into the large communal plot in early April. Into the individual six-by-six plots that could be claimed by neighborhood families, it was growers' choice.

By May, it is ready for what Sherry Maddock calls ”further glorification.“

At the far north end of the garden is a labyrinth for spiritual meditation. It is a place for dogs to walk and kites to be flown away from towering limbs. On any given summer afternoon, anyone can feel free to pick a warm tomato from the large community plot and taste what they've been missing all these years.

The idea is that this garden will be here a very long time, as will the blessings that come with it. St. Andrews Episcopal Church is talking about how beautiful the altar would look adorned in flowers grown here.

It is an accidental monument for London Ferrill and yet it fits better than anything done by yearlong study and public committee.

Born a slave and freed in 1811 by an owner who loved him, Ferrill came to Lexington and was accepted easily into all society. He was approached to be the minister for the African community here and founded the First African Baptist Church in 1824.

He lived a life of dignity that crossed all racial and socioeconomic lines. His faith was visible to even those presupposed to hate him.

For others, he provided hope like a fortress.

The mystery of his burial at the Old Episcopal Burial Grounds, though unmarked today, is not hard to understand.

In 1833, Rector Benjamin Bosworth Smith, Father Edward McMahon and London Ferrill were the only three men of the cloth who stayed to pray for the ill. Both Ferrill and Smith lost their wives early and spent many days together in close quarters.

Smith later became Bishop of Kentucky.

It was surely his desire that Ferrill be given a memorial that would last.

At last, he has.