KAYLA BUSH AND LYNN PRUETT were honored to host the University of Kentucky Monuments Workshop and Blue Grass Trust deTour. Together, they explored the Elm Bend burial site and walked the grounds of the Caise and Johnston family homeplace. From left, Nealy Williams, senior associate director of UK grant management, Christy Ferguson, with UK Monuments Workshop, Jackson Osborne, community outreach manager at Blue Grass Trust, Lynn Pruett-Mansfield, farmer, Kayla Bush, historian, Thomas McIntosh, with Media Collaboratory, and Rachel Noble-Varney, research and engagement director with UK Monuments Project. (Photo by Zack Bray, Ashland-Spears professor of law and co-director of the UK Monuments Workshop)

By Kayla Bush

Sun contributor

My family was a founding family of Elm Bend, a small hamlet in southern Woodford County. In 2022, I began exploring this history by sifting through archives preserved by my ancestors. I was stunned by the photographs over a century old, kept with meticulous care by my great-grandmother and family members, like Anna K. Caise, Katherine Bush, Herbert Bush, Lisabethe Caise and Lutisha Williams Morton-Coleman.

The discovery of the archives led me to a haunting question: Why did it take me 30 years to see where I truly came from?

Growing up at 105 Macey Ave., I lived directly across from the Versailles Cemetery. This home was the foundation of our family, purchased by my great-grandmother and great-grandfather, Pat and Nannie C. Bland.

At the time, I didn’t know that near the center of that cemetery lies the burial plot of James P. Ford Sr., a white man of significant influence who once proposed Mortonsville as the capital of Kentucky. He was also the man who held my great-grandmother’s great-grandparents as slaves in bondage. I often wonder: Did Nannie Bland know? She had been gone for over a decade by the time I began digging, but the accounting of her childhood she left behind has turned a family mystery into a formal investigation of the past.

Today, I am working alongside Lynn Pruett, a local historian and writer, to uncover what was intended to be a historical erasure. In the archives of the Woodford County Historical Society, Elm Bend is a ghost; it appears only twice, noted simply as “Brushtop” or “the colored community.” Today, from the road, the creekside settlement remains invisible to the casual observer—only the “Brushtop” of the trees is visible, hiding a community that existed for generations.

“Kayla and I were fortunate that the Blue Grass Trust and University of Kentucky Monuments Project wanted to make a short film about Elm Bend, which helps reclaim the place,” Lynn Pruett, current owner of the Johnston farm, now called Four Hills, with her husband Jim Mansfield, said. “I’ve always been fascinated by what a homeplace means, especially when ownership changes. The place, memories and physical remnants remain and have great value.”

Elm Bend was far more than a footnote or a “colored community” in the woods.

Elm Bend was a vibrant network of homes, cellars and families nestled near other established homeplaces, such as the Johnston Estate (a part of which is now Four Hills Farm). While it remained a place of active remembrance through the 1980s, much of its physical footprint has since been lost to time and the woods’ thickets. What remains today are the souls still resting in the earth. Many Black families have ancestors buried in the unregistered Elm Bend Cemetery, once part of the St. John A.M.E. Church of Elm Bend, a sister church of St. Paul A.M.E. Church of Versailles. This site, along with the remains of the original Rosenwald schoolhouse (which the Sun printed a story about in February 2025), serves as a monumental physical link to our past.

“A place like Elm Bend, which has been a place for people to gather, reflect, define who they are, who their families are, who their community is, and what that community story should mean to the larger place in which it’s embedded, is a monument as much, or maybe more so, as any statue of somebody on a pedestal,” Professor Zachary Bray, co-director of the UK Monuments Workshop, said when he toured it.

Our mission is to ensure these lives are never forgotten again. Through a partnership with Monuments Workshop (affiliated with the University of Kentucky John Rosenberg School of Law) and the Blue Grass Trust for Historic Preservation (BGT), we had the opportunity to take the public on a journey through Elm Bend via BGT’s Virtual DeTour, first airing on March 6. It is also available to watch at https://youtu.be/9N5wlUim6pg?si=3d6kwYd0HOsnFvFN.

Please watch the video, and join us in learning about this important part of Woodford County history, which continues to resonate today.