Jonesville Research Resources
Detail from Jonesville Buon Fresco Mural at the Kentucky Museum
The Museum created this centralized page to assist researchers in locating Jonesville information and research.
Jonesville
WKU’s website subtitled “Honoring Jonesville: Our People, Our Community, Our Legacy.” This website shares history about the Jonesville community and efforts the University is implementing to honor Jonesville families and descendants. Scroll down the page for the “Jonesville Timeline.”
Resources
From WKU’s Jonesville webpage, the "Resources" tab has several links to videos, research and more.
What Happened to Jonesville?
This is a condensed version of the "What Happened to Jonesville?" poster exhibition. The full exhibition is available through our traveling exhibits program or may be on view at the African American Museum of Bowling Green. YouTube video presentation of exhibit.
Jonesville Buon Fresco Mural
Local artist Alice Gatewood Waddell and WKU professor and artist Mike Nichols collaborated on a buon fresco mural commemorating Bowling Green’s Jonesville community. This webpage features time lapse video of mural’s creation, video of the artist talk and more.
Jonesville: When Sunflowers Fall
WKU PBS Documentary
2025 documentary Jonesville: When Sunflowers Fall explores the realities of urban renewal through the story of Jonesville, a community founded by African American Civil War veterans near Bowling Green, KY, that was seized and dismantled in the 1960s to make way for the expansion of Western Kentucky University. WKU PBS partnered with Jonesville residents and decedents to tell this story and ensure their voices and experiences are heard.
More Jonesville Resources
- Where's Jonesville? How the Destruction of Jonesville Left a Legacy of Housing Discrimination in Bowling Green, KY by George Carpenter
- Jonesville History Project created by WKU Honors students Catherine Rice, Chelsea Murray, and Emily Peck (Fall 2014).
- Jonesville: An Neighborhood in Bowling Green, Kentucky from Gordon Van Ness on Vimeo.
- The Jonesville Controversy paper written by Ali Wright as part of a History & the Internet class in Spring 2004.
- Photographs and objects relating to Jonesville are in KenCat.
- Oral history interviews held by WKU Folklife Archives:
- Angela Townsend, a former resident of Jonesville, 2012.
- Records from the WKU Department of Library Special Collections include:
- A map of property owners, dated May 1963.
- Map of Jonesville land to be acquired by WKU, dated 1963. Other maps are available in TopScholar.
- Additional documents on the acquisition from President Kelly Thompson's correspondence.
- Dedication of the Historical Marker for Jonesville, including the program, 2001.
- Newspaper and other clippings regarding Jonesville.
- "Jonesville" by Maxine Ray, part of the Landmark Report Vol 18, no. 3, 1999.
- "Blacks in Bowling Green" project by Mella Jena Davis, 1990.
- Newspaper clippings regarding the urban renewal in Jonesville, 1962 to 1965.
