Frankfort Heritage Lecture Series: Reflections on Crawfish Bottom (The Book)

Craw was a small neighborhood in north Frankfort, Kentucky, on fifty acres of swampy, low-lying land along the Kentucky River. To many neighborhood outsiders, Craw was considered the “bad” part of town, carrying a long list of deeply imbedded historical associations. However, neighborhood residents saw Craw from a different perspective. By 1950, every building within the fifty acres once known as “Craw,” “the Bottom,” or “Crawfish Bottom” was destroyed at the hand of urban renewal. Author Doug Boyd will reflect on his 2011 book Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community as well as the role of oral history in documenting and preserving community history and memory.

Dr. Doug Boyd directs the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky. Boyd envisioned, designed, and implemented the open-source and free Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS), which synchronizes text with audio and video online. Boyd is the co-editor of the book Oral History and Digital Humanities: Voice, Access, and Engagement, and he is the author of the book Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community.  Boyd served as president of the Oral History Association in the United States in 2016-2017 and conducted research in Australia as a Fulbright Scholar in 2019.