The City of Lexington’s “A Sense of Place” campaign continues Tuesday with an all-hamlets meeting. Hamlets or “Freetowns” are places where African Americans built communities with schools, churches, grocery stores and cemeteries after the Civil War. Tiffany Brown is the city’s equity officer.
“This is not just black history, or you know the history of the hamlets, but this is Lexington history. It also shows like our process with how we develop our city and what that looks like and where people like to live and work and play.”
More than 20 hamlets have been identified, and people who lived in them – or live there now – are invited to Picadome Golf Course at 6 p.m. for a two-hour discussion.
“If you have a connection to any of our hamlets, we want you to be there and if you have artifacts, please bring those Bibles, quilts, pictures, photographs, recipes. Those are the type of things that we are looking to collect.”
Brown said a collection of those artifacts will eventually be displayed at the Cadentown Rosenwald School. Cadentown is a Black hamlet on the east side of Lexington.
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