‘History come alive.’ UK students design park to honor historic Black community
Groups of University of Kentucky landscape architecture students have been working with Woodford County to help recognize and honor a historical Black site in the area.
Huntertown was originally established as a community for African Americans in Versailles in 1871. Fifty acres of land were sold to former enslaved African Americans. The Huntertown community included a school, businesses and houses, and by the 1940s, there were approximately 200 people living in the area.
However, the community was built on wetlands and in 2000, in part because of lengthy issues with flooding and sewage in the area, land was bought from the remaining residents and they relocated, said Sioux Finney, a former social studies teacher and community member helping lead the project.
UK students, along with community members, have designed a park to honor the location’s history. Developing the Huntertown Community Interpretive Park will revitalize the area for the community while honoring Huntertown, Finney said. She first got involved when she was teaching in Woodford County, and assigned her students a research project on Huntertown.
“This project and this community just grabbed my heart,” Finney said.
Eventually, the plan for the park is to have areas and structures that show where former parts of the Huntertown community were located, including a memorial to the former school and a pavilion where a store used to be located. UK landscape architecture students have also created designs for boardwalks to be built throughout the area and space for community gardens.
“These were communities where African Americans lived and worked and played and worshiped, from the Reconstruction Era to today,” Finney said. “Understanding that story and the contributions of African Americans to our Kentucky story is so important.”
The park has been funded by several grants, including a Woodford County Community Foundation grant and a UK Sustainability Challenge grant. Two cohorts of UK students have worked to develop master plans for what the park will eventually look like. Those students conducted research on the history of the community, including interviewing former residents and transcribing oral histories.
Jayoung Koo, an associate professor of landscape architecture at UK, teaches the class where students have created the master plans. Koo said the project is about “having the park be designed, but with the emphasis of being able to tell the Huntertown community story.” She also hopes it will be a place that former Huntertown residents will continue to gather.
“The ultimate goal is for future generations, and any visitor to that particular site, to understand the significance of that location, that community that used to live there, that used to thrive there, and continuing that storytelling into the future,” Koo said.
For students working on the park, it was important for them to listen to the voices of the community when creating their designs, Koo said.
Abby Phelps and Zoe Sermersheim, two students who took Koo’s class in the fall, said the best part of working on the project was the community engagement. They were able to talk with former Huntertown residents, while also working with Woodford County to design and pitch ideas for the park.
“That was super exciting, to be able to talk to people who have previously lived on a site that was taken apart, and we’re wanting to help them rebuild that history they lost,” Phelps said.
The two also said they hope the park serves as an educational site for those who visit, but also a place for the community to come together and enjoy. Phelps said she hopes their designs will “immerse you in the past, instead of trying to walk over it.”
“It’s a gorgeous site,” Sermersheim said. “It’s just so green and lush and beautiful. I’m hoping that people will want to continue returning, and every time they come, they’ll learn something new.”
The goal is to have the first informational signs installed by Juneteenth of this year, Finney said.
“It makes history come alive,” Finney said. “It puts a face on history.”