Descendants & Family Stewardship Initiative

Planning the Succession, Stewardship, & Cherishment of
​the Clemmons Farm: ​An African American Legacy
​Dr. Jackson JW Clemmons and Mrs. Lydia Monroe Clemmons purchased their late-1700s era farm in Vermont in 1962. Over the years, they worked as a full-time doctor and nurse, farmed the land, raised a family, engaged deeply with their local schools and community, travelled extensively, and ran an African art import and mail-order business- one of the first in the country- from the property. The Clemmons Farm is an official landmark on the Vermont African American Heritage Trail and is a site of national historic significance listed in the National Register of Historic Places.  The Farm houses an exhibit of the Clemmons’ personal art collection. Funding will support family-led and descendant-led stewardship planning to ensure the site’s future public programming and capital project goals.  
The Clemmons Farm is one of seven historic sites across the nation that are selected to receive a two-year Decendants and Family Stewardship Initiative grant award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

​​The grant will support succession planning and other work by Clemmons Family Farm, Inc.’s staff and Board of Directors, a national team of historic preservation experts, consultants, and communities in Vermont, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Wisconsin to ensure the sustainable stewardship and cherishment of the Clemmons Farm- a rare gem and a deeply meaningful place.
 Pushing Ahead the Next Generation of Stewards ​
Above:​  We Are The Composite of All of the Generations Before Us is a 90-second soliloquy by Mrs. Lydia Monroe Clemmons, then 93 years old, during a family storytelling session with her eldest daughter, Lydia, in 2016. The video features a selection of photos featuring generations of women elders in the Monroe and Clemmons families.

​​With a new Descendants & Family Stewardship Initiative grant, we will mobilize and engage descendant communities in Vermont (statewide); Roper, North Carolina; Ringgold, Louisiana; Beloit, Milwaukee, and Madison Wisconsin to contribute to the stewardship planning process and to contribute to our collection of oral histories, personal stories, historical documents in the Clemmons Farm exhibits and archives.  

​Work will include developing a summer internship program for high school students to learn how to steward and cherish the Clemmons Farm as an African American cultural heritage site. Student internships will include historical research, gathering descendant communities' oral histories and family stories, curating and installing new exhibits, and developing the professional stewardship and cherishment skills needed to lead guided tours of the Clemmons Farm.

About the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund 
Across the country, descendant communities and families are engaged in exciting and ground-breaking efforts to reclaim, rescue, and share overlooked stories and places of resilience, perseverance, and accomplishment. The impact of these efforts deserves admiration, resources, and partnership.  In response, the National Trust for Historic Preservation launched its African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund (Action Fund) in November 2017.  The program makes an important and lasting contribution to the American landscape by preserving sites of Black activism and achievement. 

Powered by the Mellon Foundation's Humanities in Place program, the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund awards grants and provides specialized consultation and best practices support for a period of two years for awardees.  The Action Fund is a movement that uses preservation as a force for enacting positive social change. In modeling this approach and in partnering with other organizations around the country, the Action Fund realizes equity-driven outcomes that benefit all Americans. Clemmons Family Farm is one of the 7 applicants selected from more than 150 applicants across the United States to be funded in the 2025 cohort of Action Fund grantees.

​Grants from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund's Descendant and Family Stewardship Initiative will empower and equip descendant-led and family-led organizations and projects to preserve, activate, and manage historic places.  With more than $150 million raised, the Action Fund is the largest U.S. resource dedicated to the preservation of African American historic places.  The historic Clemmons Farm in Vermont is one of seven sites in the nation to receive a Descendant and Family Stewardship grant to advance ongoing preservation activities for historic sites, buildings, and landscapes that represent African American cultural heritage. 

Clemmons Family Farm's Descendant and Family Stewardship Initiative is funded by the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

To learn more about this program and all of the Y2025 grant recipients, please visit:  Descendant and Family Stewardship Initiative | National Trust for Historic Preservation.