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Sleettown
was booming community Research by Centre College history major, Mary Quinn Kerbaugh, discovered some history of Sleettown, an African American community which existed near Perryville from post-Civil War times into the mid-20th Century. There is little left of the once thriving community. Sleettown was located near the H. P. Bottom House, near Perryville Battlefield, between land owned by H. P. Bottom and John Dye, on the Hays Mays Road. At one time, it contained a restaurant, a cemetery (no longer extant), a store and taxi service. Kerbaugh said, "Sleettown had its own Jones store, a honky-tonk restaurant, homes and the cemetery." ... "The men worked as sharecroppers and the women tended to household duties. Sleettown was largely self-sufficient during its years of existence." In 1880, the Boyle County commissioner vested the land between the Bottom and Dye farms to Preston and Henry Sleet, according to a lawsuit filed 3 January 1880. Apparently the Sleets had been living on that land since 1865. Other African American families, including the Patterson and Pope families, settled nearby, and by 1880, they had purchased much of the land. In 1881, Preston and Henry Sleet purchased 14 acres on Doctor's Fork Creek from T W Bottom for $300. They purchased another two acres from Samuel D Bottom in 1883, and the family continued buying land until the 1930s. Henry Sleet's heirs sold much of the land in 1931, parcels going to Simon and Lucinda Sleet, Emma Sleet Bottoms, Rachel and Herbert Peters, Mary Bell and C.E. Elliott, Howard and Sadie Sleet Clark. They sold the land to Octavis Sleet Copeland, Amanda Anthony, Lot Sleet, Sam Sleet and Henry Sleet Jr. Once many Sleettown residents moved into Perryville after about 1900, the children attended a one-room school. Kerbaugh adds, "For Raymond Sleet, school was a one-room school house with classes taught by his cousin Amelia Burton." The building had one small classroom and often contained about 30 children from kindergarten to grade 8. “Remembering Perryville: History and Memory at a Civil War Battlefield”. Kenneth W. Noe, Dept. of History, Auburn University, Auburn AL 36830. Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association Conference, Apr. 14, 2001 Worried about partisans as well as suspicious of Kentucky’s loyalties, Federal authorities maintained a heavy hand on the community and the commonwealth throughout the remainder of the conflict. The result was a crucial shift among whites from their pre-war Whiggery toward the postwar Democratic party, a redirection largely occasioned by Lincoln appointees’ treatment of Kentucky as an almost-conquered province coupled with an unrealistic hope to hang onto their slave property. The sight of Black men in blue uniforms, some local residents, particularly galled local whites and stimulated a violent reaction. In the bitter years immediately following the war, county “Regulators” lynched three Blacks. Some wags eventually opined that Kentucky had finally joined the Confederacy, only four years too late. In the face of such violence, Perryville’s African Americans struggled to build a viable and self-sustaining community in the aftermath of emancipation and the Thirteenth Amendment. In 1865, a group of three extended families led by Preston Sleet, a former Boyle County slave who took up arms during the battle and left with the Federal army, occupied about 150 acres of battlefield land. For several years, the male residents of Sleettown, as it came to be called, toiled as sharecroppers. They apparently worked hard and lived frugally, for in 1880 Preston and Henry Sleet purchased the property from the financially strapped Henry Bottom and a neighbor. During the years that followed, they added additional, smaller tracts purchased from the Bottoms. Sleettown survived as a different monument to the Civil War’s legacy well into a new century, its restaurant, general store, and taxi service providing a brief prosperity, while its church and one-room school otherwise enriched the lives of the hamlet’s populace. Since the initial battlefield movement [in the early 1900s] culminated in completing the Confederate cemetery, Perryville’s residents had continued hoping that they could persuade the federal government or the state to purchase the forty or fifty acres surrounding the site, essentially the locale of the battle’s initial clashes, for a battlefield park. The new commission was no exception. The all-Black settlement of Sleettown, lay squarely in the middle of their proposed battlefield. Sleettown actually disappeared in these years of proposed park expansion, its residents abandoning the area for homes in town. The Depression usually is cited as the cause of Sleettown’s demise, but a recently undertaken oral history project should provide more information on the town’s demise. As David Blight has noted, reminders of slavery and Black freedom did not mesh with the national trend toward white reconciliation and memory of the war as a whites-only affair unconnected to slavery. One cannot help but wonder if Sleettown simply was in the way. By the mid-1970s, Perryville had grown over time to ninety-eight acres, including the now unmarked Sleettown site.
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