The Homeplace
2,303 views · Published 27 April 2010 · 3:09 · Indexed 4 November 2026
Channel: NPR · 2010 · News & Politics
There's a photo tacked over the stove in photographer Sarah Hoskins' home. It's of her and a man named Ernest Talbert, a hog butcher and a pillar of the tiny communities that used to be called the "Negro Hamlets." The clusters of homes on hilltops and creek bottoms around Lexington, Ky., were built on land bought by newly freed slaves in the 1860s and 1870s. They have names like Frogtown, Maddoxtown, Zion Hill. Many of these towns still survive today, six or seven generations later, though some are fading fast into history. Clabber Bottom is down to just a few houses. Hoskins prefers to call these communities "The Homeplace," which is also the title of her ongoing documentary project. She's logged thousands of miles traveling to the area from her Illinois home. When she started taking photographs, she hoped to bring a historic part of America's post-Civil War past to life. Ten years later, she's become part of the community she came to observe.
