Sweat gathered on Cassandra Sea’s forehead as she walked along a paved path at Farmington Historic Plantation on a sweltering July afternoon.

She stopped at a circular stone opening, where a memorial erected at the center stands waist-high. Her fingers traced the outline of the engravings atop the bronze monument, brushing over the image of two African Americans — David and Martha Spencer, the great-great-great-grandparents of Cassandra’s son, Benjamin Sea. A couple once enslaved at the 550-acre hemp plantation.

Cassandra didn't break her gaze as she commented on another striking element of the medallion: two strong hands holding tightly to a piece of rope, twisted from hemp.

“The rope our ancestors were beat with and lynched with was the very thing they (broke) their backs to help produce,” Cassandra said. “Rope was a form of control.”

Cassandra spent years trying to authenticate the Sea family’s generations of oft-embellished oral history with the sparse slave records she could find. Then in 2003, she found David and Martha Spencer.

Since then, she has provided to Farmington an archive of documents and an account of real people's lives who were once enslaved there — including those in her own son's bloodline. For her, it's a connection to the past that would have otherwise been lost.

“I really believe our story is to show people that you can trace your family back, that flowing in everybody’s DNA is a skill, a talent, a mindset or work ethic that goes back generations,” Cassandra said.

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Despite the horrific historical connection, the 64-year-old retired Louisville woman often sits near the monument at Farmington to read or meditate. When Cassandra visits, she feels a spiritual connection — in and among the Sea family’s ancestors, as she likes to say.

Her 38-year-old son, Benjamin, has inherited her passion for digging into their bloodline.

Nearly two centuries later, Benjamin has chosen to plant the same seeds his ancestors were forced to in a new plot of hemp on the property — as part of Farmington's initiatives to bring the crop back to its fields.

"When I planted that hemp, not only did I want to give honor to my ancestors, I wanted to plant a seed in getting my family involved, to teach my children that skill," Benjamin said.

"It’s what I call self-reparations."

The history of hemp in Kentucky can't be told without talking about slavery, Benjamin said.

His enslaved ancestors didn't reap the financial rewards of Kentucky's hemp crop, which was the state's driving economic force before the Civil War. After emancipation, and plantations like Farmington lost its slave labor force, the hemp industry was depleted. Kentucky moved on to tobacco.

Now, Benjamin has a chance to be part of hemp's rebirth in Kentucky, where growing hemp with a license has been legal since 2014 after it was removed from the controlled substance list. Among supporters of the state's thriving hemp resurgence, and the national 2018 Farm Bill, is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

"The hemp industry was carved away from us, and I want to take it back," Benjamin said.

For Benjamin and Cassandra, it's about genetic inheritance.

"It makes me wonder, what was in (my ancestors) that is in me right now?" he said. "... This is why when I learn about what these people went through, it makes me feel like I can take on that character and survive anything."

A shifting narrative

Tucked at the end of a narrow, tree-lined drive at Bardstown Road near the Watterson Expressway, Farmington was once a 550-acre hemp plantation, owned by the Speed family — one of Kentucky’s oldest and most prominent families.

Between 50 and 70 slaves were held at Farmington, some harvesting hemp and weaving it into rope, cloth, paper and twine bins for baling cotton across the deep south.

When visitors came to the plot of land 25 years ago, they were welcomed to Farmington Historic “Home” — not “Plantation,” said Kathy Nichols, executive director.

“You would’ve seen a beautiful property and been talked to about all the china and furniture and what a lovely life the Speeds had,” Nichols said. “Yes, that happened at Farmington, but that happened at Farmington because of all these other people who enabled this extremely elegant lifestyle.”

For years, Farmington struggled to interpret its slave history. Visitors were greeted with the story of Abraham Lincoln’s friendship with the Speed family and his visit to the plantation in 1841.

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For years, the slave narrative at Farmington relied on the accounts of the white men who held them in bondage. An exhibit in the 1990s portrayed patriarch John Speed as a kind slave owner and Farmington as a place where slaves would never want to leave — and if they left, John Speed wouldn't go after them.

“Kentucky slaveholders at the time perpetuated the myth that it was better to be a slave in Kentucky than anywhere else,” Nichols said.

The public's reaction to the out-of-touch exhibit nearly ended Farmington as a historic, nonprofit site.

If it wasn’t for Cassandra’s digging, said Nichols, Farmington wouldn't have the context or tangible connection to David and Martha Spencer, now engraved on the medallion, after a picture was given to the plantation by a cousin of the Sea's in the 1970s.

“The Sea’s have changed Farmington because we now have real information from a real family that was enslaved here,” Nichols said. “The biggest hurdle we have here is encouraging African Americans to get involved and help us interpret their history.”

Nichols said as Kentucky once again embraces hemp, it also needs to acknowledge its connections to the labor force who built the industry. In order to tell a complete story at Farmington, they need as many perspectives as they can find — and Cassandra and Benjamin's efforts have been instrumental in building a new chapter for the historic plantation.

"The Sea's understand how important it is for people to know their heritage, to know where you came from and know where you can go," Nichols said. "And that’s what we want children to come away from here with — a sense of pride in their history."

The family's search

It was Father’s Day 2003 when Cassandra's late husband, Glenn Sea, stood up in a Sunday church service to talk about fatherhood and the importance of family in the black community. Glenn — a 34-year GE employee and mayor of Worthington Hills from 2011 until his death in 2018 — mentioned that his family was descendants of slaves at Farmington Plantation.

It was a story Cassandra had never heard.

Since that day, she's been on a relentless hunt to connect the dots in her husband’s lineage.

As with many African Americans, tracing genealogy proved challenging. She deciphered the sparse slave records that exist in Kentucky, kept haphazardly in more of a grocery list rather than a proper census. She dug through census data, microfiche and withered family photos. And she walked rows of cemeteries all over Jefferson County.

Today, Cassandra is the keeper of that history, of the connection between her family and slavery at Farmington.

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She remembers maiden names and married names, those who died young, how many children they had and where the families settled in Louisville. She memorized all the offspring.

In a large folder filled with documents and photos, Cassandra pointed to the lineage that took years to uncover: David and Martha Spencer, two head slaves at Farmington, had about a 20-year age difference and as many as 12 children. One was Herbert Spencer.

Herbert had Willie Mae Spencer who married Theodore Titus. Willie Mae and Theodore Titus had Anna Titus, who married Thomas Sea. Anna and Thomas Sea had Glenn Sea, who died in September 2018. After leaving Farmington, the Spencer's settled in what's now the neighborhood of Newburg, home to generations of descendants of African American slaves.

Glenn and Cassandra both went to Newburg Elementary School. But their lives didn't cross until they met and married in 1979.

The couple raised five children in Worthington Hills, including Benjamin, a former Air Force airman and contractor.

“We just found these pictures,” Cassandra said. “We looked everywhere after Glenn’s mother, Anna Sea, passed away last year.”

There's one from the early 1900s of Willie Mae when she was 4 years old with her siblings and the family dog. And another of David and Martha Spencer — faded sepia images damaged over time.

Benjamin pulled out death certificates and census records with faded cursive handwriting, almost completely illegible.

"This is the kind of information that you have to dig through,” he said.

Cassandra found maps from 1879 in a Jefferson County archive that show the old home place in Newburg where David and Martha Spencer settled after they were freed or released from Farmington — a neighborhood that through the 20th century became a thriving ecosystem of black families, farms and businesses.

All of these documents link them to a past they can now prove but don't remember.

But Bill Titus, a cousin, is one of two family members who does remember. His recollections remind Cassandra and Benjamin that slavery wasn't so far in the distant past.

Bill, now 64, was 5 years old when his great-grandfather — Herbert Spencer — died. Herbert was the son of David and Martha Spencer, the link that connects the entire family to Farmington Plantation.

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Bill didn't think of his grandfather as the son of slaves. He remembers the undocumented, word-of-mouth, unsung legacy of his grandparents. He remembers growing up in Herbert Spencer's home in Newburg in the 1950s, where there was no indoor plumbing, where they ate food grown in Herbert's garden and drank water from the wells.

"I don’t know what life was like at Farmington but I know what life was like on Goffner Lane," in Newburg, he said. "I knew who my great-grandfather was. I saw him through a child's eyes. He was my protector.

"He would pick me up on his shoulders. He had an old surplus army truck in his barn that I would play in all the time... I accidentally got it started one day and it crashed through the wood barn. But grandpa protected me from getting in trouble."

Herbert Spencer was a contractor who built homes all over Newburg. The plaster had a special component to hold the bricks together, a technique Herbert would've learned from his father: hemp.

That hemp-made mortar, Benjamin said, is another example of his ancestor's resilience.

"Under the most extreme pressures, my great-great-grandfathers were able to go inside themselves and take out a gift that was being exploited," Benjamin said. "In the midst of that exploitation, they were able to take their skills and benefit from them.”

History in the soil

On a muggy day in June, Benjamin arrived at a plot of land behind Farmington's historic home and its illustrious garden. With advocacy group the Kentucky Hempsters, Benjamin was the first person to drop hemp seeds into the tilled soil along the first row of the new 20-by-15-foot plot.

Soil between his fingers made Benjamin feel spiritually connected to the same earth where his ancestors planted hemp generations before.

Six weeks later, he came back to check on the crop. He knelt by a row of small, green sprouts.

"Within my blood, that hemp history was rich, so it was an honor to be involved in the planting of this hemp," he said. "Not only to gain the knowledge but to show my ancestors that I see them and I respect their experience."

Like his parents before him, Benjamin doesn't want to hide the story of slavery from his 7-year-old son Sekou. At Farmington, he points to the home where Martha Spencer cooked for the Speeds, to the outposts of land where David Spencer planted hemp. He explains to Sekou that grandpa Glenn's great-great-grandparents lived and worked here.

"Sekou doesn't walk around with shame or ignorance about our history," Benjamin said. "Our goal is for him to speak about it with pride, honor and understanding."

Reach reporter Savannah Eadens at SEadens@courierjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter at @savannaheadens.

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