Nearly two decades ago, Jim Hunn was wandering around a cemetery in Boyle county, Kentucky, when a small headstone caught his eye. He stared at the name etched on it: Jordan Wallace. Hunn can’t explain exactly why, but he felt an instant attachment.

“I got a feeling when I saw it,” he said.

He later learned that Wallace was his great-great-grandfather: a slave who, with three of his sons, escaped his owner’s home in 1864 to travel to Camp Nelson, a nearby Union army supply depot and recruitment camp where more than 10,000 African American soldiers lived during the civil war while serving in the US Colored Troops, who fought for the Union. Wallace and his sons joined the troops when they arrived. 

Camp Nelson has existed in relative obscurity since then, despite its pivotal role in the history of US slavery. But now years of hard work by local enthusiasts to protect the site may be paying off. In an unexpected and little-noticed move, the Trump administration, which drastically shrank national monuments in Utah, recently proposedturning Camp Nelson into a monument, along with another site in Mississippi, commemorating African American history.

“Nobody knows it’s here, or the significance of this place for African Americans,” Hunn, a soft-spoken 77-year-old man, said as he rocked in a wooden rocking chair on the porch of Camp Nelson’s interpretive center one windy day in late March. “It makes me proud to know where I came from. My theory is if you are black and born in Kentucky, you had somebody connected to Camp Nelson.”