Every year, thousands of people visit Ashland, the Lexington, a state of Kentucky statesman Henry Clay.

Now a new tour uses legal documents and information from archeological digs to tell the stories of some of the enslaved who lived and worked at one of Kentucky's most famous homes.

Henry Clay's life was, you know, a very important man and a great statesman.

But he also enslaved over 120 some people here in Ashland in honor of Black History Month.

Here at Ashland, we opened a new exhibit called Traces and Fragments.

And that is a result of many years of working on developing our Traces tour, which launched back in 2019.

We examine the lives of the many people who were enslaved here in Ashland, and as a result, many people ask, Where did we get the information and how were we making these connections?

And that came from archeological digs.

It came from digging through legal documents.

We document and we pull out fragment pieces that connect the life of Henry Clay with those who are enslaved on the estate.

But we have fragments, we have pieces, we have information found from various sources.

But one of the unique things through the Digital Access Project, we digitized over nine 1000 pages and 176 books as of the end of December 2023.

Within those records are names of those who are enslaved, who were either sold, purchased, auctioned off.

It doesn't say who they were, which is why we are very careful to use the word enslaved.

It was a condition put on them, not by their own will.

It was something that was done to them.

History is very fluid.

And one of the things that we do know is that African-American history is American history.

We share the same landscape and the same scope of history.

So it just makes it more complete.

We did have a lot of help from the African-American community.

In fact, it was one of those ladies that came up with the traces.

That was the title, because they left so little trace of themselves for us to see today.

We may not know everything about them, but we can at least call out their name and lift up their name as reverence and respect for how much they were suffered through the institution of slavery.

History is something that provides great insight into how things are happening today.

Not knowing history can hurt you.

So by telling the full, complete story, we hope to engage more people and have them have a deeper appreciation for our Kentucky and American history.

An interesting question.

The fact of the matter.

Hmm.

The tour officially opens to the public on March 1st, which is this Friday.