Welcome to the Richmond KY Parks & Recreation GeoTrail (RPGT3). To participate in this GeoTrail and earn your free souvenir for finding at least 25 out of 30+ geocaches available, visit: Richmond KY GeoTrail to obtain your Passport.
In celebration of Berea College’s 150-year anniversary in 2005, the College made a gift to the City of Berea of a small sculpture park located at the site of Berea’s first school building, which was built in 1855. A later, brick building housed an elementary and high school on the very corner where the park stands now at the intersection of Chestnut, Fee, and Boone streets. Some of the bricks in the park’s walkway are from this building.
Berea College President at the time, Larry Shin, was able to secure donations to commission Stan Watts, a sculptor from Utah whose work was known to one of the major donors, to create five bronze statues. The goal was not just to honor Berea’s founder, John G. Fee, but to also tell the story of Kentucky’s first interracial and coeducational school.
The Back Story:
One of the most influential men in Kentucky during the time when the state was admitted to the Union in 1792 was General Green Clay of Madison County. He was a surveyor brought here by Daniel Boone. He was born in Powhatan County, Virginia on August 14, 1757, died October 31, 1826 in Madison County, KY. (He's buried in a small private cemetery beside White Hall Park.) Green Clay was married to Sally Lewis, daughter of Eliza and Thomas Lewis.
Green Clay established his residence at White Hall, first built in 1799. The mansion is a sprawling 44 rooms tucked away in the beautiful farmland of northern Madison County. Gen. Green Clay was by far the largest slave owner in the state. His son, Cassius Marcellus Clay, would soon remedy that issue.
Meet John G. Fee
Born in 1816, John Gregg Fee was the son of a Bracken County, KY slaveholder. Educated at Augusta Academy, Miami University, and Lane Seminary in nearby Cincinnati, OH, Fee began his missionary work in Lewis County, Kentucky. In 1848, his ministry efforts were financially assisted when he became employed by the American Missionary Association.
Fee’s antislavery work in Madison and surrounding counties in KY proved to be more difficult than it had been in Lewis County, which had a smaller slave population. From his arrival in 1854 to his exile in 1859, Fee and his fellow missionaries experienced intimidation and threats of mob violence on numerous occasions. During the Civil War era, Kentucky was a slave holding state that was considered part of the Union. This led to fierce battles and deep divisions within the state, and even within families who lived in KY.
In the late 1840’s Fee became acquainted with Cassius Marcellus Clay (son of Green Clay) of Madison County, Kentucky (remember White Hall). Cassius Clay, a distant cousin of famous statesman Henry Clay, had tried his hand at publishing an anti-slavery newspaper in Lexington, KY but strident community opposition forced him to move the operation to Cincinnati, OH where it eventually went out of business. Cassius Clay was a politically ambitious man that wanted to see the end of slavery in Kentucky. Cassius wanted slavery ended gradually, so poorer whites would not have to compete against slave labor for jobs. He felt that his best chance to attain high office was to appeal to the non-slaveholding majority of whites in Kentucky.
In 1854, Cassius Clay convinced John G. Fee to move to Madison County to start a school to educate the youth of the area by gifting him a tract of land i what is now Berea, KY. Fee accepted the gift and brought missionary friends he had met through the American Missionary Association with him. The following year Fee started Berea school.
Fee wanted slavery abolished because of his belief that owning a man or placing oneself above another in any form was a sin against God’s law. This would cause a deep rift between Fee and Clay in the late 1850s. Unlike Fee, Cassius was not an abolitionist, he was an emancipationist. Cassius felt slavery should end transitionally, not immediately. Once Cassius provided the land for a school, Fee began to educate, integrate, and build, beginning with the Berea School and later creating Berea College.
The Park
The statue group includes John G. Fee, holding a Bible, and Elizabeth Rogers, the school’s first teacher, showing the Declaration of Independence to an African American girl, while two boys, one white and one black, watch from a bench. The Bible in Fee’s hand is open to the Book of Acts, to the section that talks about Berea being a city that welcomed the gospel. This is the passage that inspired Fee to name the school that he founded - Berea.
Elizabeth Rogers and her husband, the Reverend J.A.R. Rogers, came to Berea in 1858, shortly after the Fees. While the men were clearing land, Elizabeth began holding classes. Fee asked the American Methodist Association to pay Elizabeth the same amount they provided for the men and they complied. In 1859, the Fees and Rogers' were forced out of Berea under the threat of violence but continued to work toward establishment of the College during the American Civil War. Fee continued his work at Camp Nelson until the war ended, when he, J.A.R. and Elizabeth Rogers, and others, returned to Berea and restarted the school, known as the Berea Literary Institute, which was the forerunner of Berea College. Fee wanted low-cost education for “all persons of good moral character,” regardless of race.