Sleettown: Gateway To Freedom

Sleettown: Gateway To Freedom. Sleettown . Gateway To Freedom. , After the Civil War, two newly-freed slaves, Henry and Preston Sleet, laid the foundation for Sleettown. This became a thriving African-American community that prospered from 1865 to the early 1930s., Although the official purchase of the property recognized as Sleettown was not recorded until 1880 at the Boyle County Courthouse, deed records suggest that the Sleet family had resided and sharecropped this land as early as 1865. The Sleet family continued to purchase property around the initial parcel of land, ever increasing the size of Sleettown. Together, Sleets, Pattersons, Swanns, and other families turned the farm into a small community., Sleettown included a store, restaurant, cemetery, and several homes. Raymond Sleet, a descendant of Preston, remembered Sleettown having its "own store, [and a] restaurant that would be a honky-tonk nowadays...." Several homes and a cemetery also made up the Sleettown community. In the early 20th century, when most of Kentucky was racially segregated, the relationship with neighboring whites was open and friendly. A sincere spirit of fellowship existed, where neighbors worked side by side on the farm and in their homes. Often blacks and whites would come together in the evenings to visit or play a game of cards, and their children played together., By 1931, possibly spurred on by the Great Depression, the last of the residents left Sleettown and moved into Perryville. The kindred spirit felt by each member of the community provided Sleettown its success for nearly 70 years. In an era defined by segregation and prejudice, these neighbors embraced one another in this unique community., "I loved it out there . . . oh boy, we had more fun out there. The neighbors . . . would come over to our house, we'd play checkers, bingo. Sleets lived on one side of the creek, whites on the other side." , -Hattie Sleet, from an oral history in 1998, (Caption):, The Perryville Battlefield in 1876; Sleettown grew up around the B.F. Chatham Estate.