At the southwest corner of Louisville’s Gene Snyder Freeway, as the four-lane loop crosses 31W/Dixie Highway and heads into its last few westward yards before turning north to follow Valley Station’s Ohio River frontage, is Riverside, the Farnsley-Moremen Landing. Named for a 19th Century riverboat landing, the now-humble, once-grand gracious red brick “I-house” was built around 1837 by Gabriel Farnsley and the enslaved people he ungraciously owned. It was these enslaved people who made the farm prosper, as they built most of the property’s structures and did most of the actual farming. Farnsley died without a will and the Moremen family ended up with the farm in the late 1800s, when the property served as a riverboat landing where folks traveling the Ohio could stop to trade goods like lye soap, which the Moremen family sold and for which they monikered the spot “Soap Landing.”
History records show that both the Farnsleys and Moremens owned enslaved people and include the stories of a skilled bricklayer and boat deck hand named Dave who worked for the Farnsleys and passing travelers, and Kitty and Richard Moremen Thomas who were known to have a particularly close relationship with the Moremen family – as close, one supposes, as enslaved people can realistically be to their white owners. The large front lawn of the water-facing house eases down westward to the verdant riverside banks of the Ohio. Across the short expanse of “the River Jordan” is the Indiana land many people once saw as “free.” I walked the lovely grounds in solitude, except for the lone man sitting amid the grove of maples and tulip poplars whose boombox played AM hits from the 90’s. His modern tunes amongst such hushed and storied landscape were as difficult to reconcile as the painful history of the varied people who once worked this land, all within earshot of freedom. Welcome to the South.
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After decades of very infrequent return trips to my birthplace of Louisville, KY, I’m coming home for a much longer visit, while the current global situation provides work-from-home flexibilities like never before. In many ways, my adopted family is so much bigger than when I left 35 years ago (hello!), as my cousins have had kids and their kids have kids now, too. I also know siblings and parents on both sides of my biological family tree, causing me to joke that my familial plant form is really more ivy than tree. On the other hand, I’ve said goodbye to my dad and a brother, grandparents, and friends, all of whom travel with me in my heart, now, as I relate with the world.
With a little bit of experience and maybe a few secret herbs and spices of wisdom, I’m excited to see Kentucky through the fresh, honest eyes of out-and-proud adulthood. I have more scars than wounds these days, allowing my worldview to be a little more unblinking and my self-view more honest, but also increasingly gentle. Galleries and restaurants call to me for a visit, as do mile-markers and monuments, natural vistas and urban cityscapes. But most of all, there are people to reconnect with and internal conversations to be had with the chorus of inner selves who chant and sing, cheer and jeer, whisper, shout, and laugh as I return to where I started and perhaps know the place for the very first time. |
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