Project Summary

In 1845, James Coleman was born into slavery on a farm less than seven miles from downtown Lexington, Kentucky. On March 27, 1888, as free people, Coleman and his wife, Lucy, purchased 13 acres in the African-American Hamlet of Uttingertown in Fayette County, Kentucky. This was farmland once tilled by Coleman as a slave and became known as the Coleman Crest Farm. The farm remains in the Coleman Family, and over 300 descendants trace their ancestry to the formerly enslaved Colemans of Fayette County, Kentucky.

One relative, William David Coleman, became the 13th President of Liberia. Also born into Fayette County slavery three years before James, William Coleman moved with his widowed mother and three siblings to Liberia in 1853. Many Coleman Family Oral History Project narrators hail from Clay-Ashland, Liberia, a town established by the American Colonization Society (ACS), of which Kentucky statesman and the town's namesake Henry Clay was a founder. Clay-Ashland was part of an 1828 'Kentucky In Africa' colony of the ACS settled primarily by African-American immigrants from Kentucky.

In the 1950s, several of William David Coleman's descendants returned to the American East Coast and, over time, established the Richards & Coleman Family Foundation, which holds annual family reunions in both the United States and Liberia. In the summer of 2024, on the Coleman Crest Farm in Fayette County, Kentucky, the family reunion was held for the first time on land where their ancestors were once enslaved.

I Was Here is a public art project that explores the idea of Nation Builders, in particular, those whose ancestors were forcibly relocated to America. I Was Here artist and mastermind Marjorie Guyon, in collaboration with LexArts, arranged interviews with as many of the Coleman family as possible during the rare 2024 reunion. These are their stories.