Sugar Hill is one of at least 30 rural African American freetowns that lie nestled among the famous horse farms that ring the city of Lexington. Among the best known are Bracktown, Cadentown, Coletown, Fort Spring, Frogtown, Jimtown, Jonestown, Keene, Maddoxtown, New Zion, Pricetown, Uttingertown, and Zion Hill. Freed people established most of these communities soon after the Civil War, on land they purchased or were given by white farm and estate owners who wanted to attract a paid labor force.

Very little is known about Sugar Hill. The Pisgah Rural Historic District application to the National Register of Historic Places, the U.S. Census, and the memories of nearby residents offer invaluable but incomplete information about this small historic community, which is not mentioned in contemporary studies of the Kentucky freetowns.

Sugar Hill was located in Woodford County just off the Pisgah Pike and Payne’s Mill Road, south of Faywood. In 1868, Sarah Hagar deeded the 18 acres that became Sugar Hill to Mary (Mrs. Benjamin F.) Payne. Neither woman’s race is known. By the 1890s, African Americans owned this property and the surrounding lots, and had deeded land to Woodford County for a Colored District 8 school. The school served the community as a gathering place and reportedly hosted religious revivals led by an African American minister from Bracktown, a freetown closer to Lexington.

Today many of the freetowns are shrinking or have disappeared, due to Lexington’s suburban sprawl and the lure of increased opportunities elsewhere. Sugar Hill, always a small community, has suffered that fate. According to the 1940 Census, members of the Blair, Raglin, Mulder, Palm, George, Countee, and Howard families lived in eight adjacent properties on Sugar Hill Road. Today, the Blair home is the only remaining residence associated with Sugar Hill’s historic black community.