The Hunterfly Road Houses, Weeksville Heritage Center. (Credit: Danielle Cooper)
On a recent Friday in October, a group of five people — four African Americans and one Caribbean — roamed the gallery of the Weeksville Heritage Center as they waited for a tour of the historic Hunterfly Road Houses to begin. The L-shaped corridor was lined with floor-to-sealing windows. A colorful collage that blended images of generations of families of Weeksville and the Hunterfly Road Houses, and a copy of Golden Legacy Illustrated History Magazine enclosed in a case, all sat on display in the sun-lit gallery. Through the glass windows, at the center of this campus, lay a luscious green garden, a modern sculpture ‘Sugar in My Bowl II’ by Chakaia Booker, and a pathway that led to the heritage site.
It’s a pathway to the past, and to an important part of African American history, a story that the Heritage Center staff hope will be more widely heard now that the city and state have boosted the center’s funding. The Hunterfly Road Houses are the last remaining structures of Weeksville, Brooklyn, a free independent Black community in New York City. Weeksville, in Crown Heights, was founded in 1838 by James Weeks, who escaped slavery in Virginia. He purchased two plots of land to establish the neighborhood. New York became the third state in the nation to abolish slavery eleven years prior.
“Free slaves began to build small fortunes working on the docks and hog farming and through the purchasing of land from former, prominent slave owners, the Lefferts family,” Ari Knight, a tour educator at Weeksville Heritage Center, said as she guided a group of visitors. Knight said that the community was a mix of land owners and renters and evolved into the second largest self-sustained, free Black neighborhoods in the country.
The Weeksville Heritage Center is undergoing a $6 million renovation — funded by New York State and New York City — announced in February, as part of efforts to weatherize the historic homes to protect them against climate change and preserve the legacy of Weeksville. The historic site in Crown Heights North has become a center that uses education, art and social justice themes to create a deeper understanding of how the past has and continues to shape current and future generations.
Knight, a tour educator at the Heritage Center, led the multi-generational visitors through the garden to the Hunterfly Road Houses.
“Hunterfly Road is the oldest remaining part of Weeksville,” Knight said. “As for the houses… what I can tell you about the construction of the houses we’re still trying to figure out.”
Knight described the scholarly debate about when and how the Hunterfly Road Houses were built. She pointed to the doors and windows, which she said are a 19th century Dutch design. “Architects have estimated that these houses are about 200 years old,” Knight said, “when geographers look at the maps and plans of the time, that looks closer to 150 years.”
Knight said that she and the Heritage Center staff are “discussing new ways” to engage their local community and New Yorkers across the five boroughs.
“From what we hear from residents of the neighborhood, including my grandmother who grew up across the street in the Kingsborough Houses, much of the community has no knowledge of the history of Weeksville,” Knight said.
For example, Knight brought up a collection of photos that the growing Heritage Center staff — aided by the recent city and state funding — recently uncovered in their unsorted archival collection. The current funding has helped the center fill roles to support the sorting of archival materials and continued research. The photos, from the 1960s and 1970s, show Weeksville residents’ day-to-day lives.
Knight told the tour-goers that the photos have become a tangible way for people to connect with the Heritage Center. They see the photos of the Weeksville residents from decades ago, and it “feels special and kind of like a homecoming.” The photos are helping to bridge the gap of the history of Weeksville pre and post-urbanization.
The Hunterfly Road Houses, Weeksville Heritage Center, and the Knightsborough Houses. (Credit: Danielle Cooper)
A 72-year-old named Islamecca Blackman listened carefully to Knight’s tour as she talked about communities vanishing. Blackman said she is one of three generations of women in her family to have been born at St. Mary’s Hospital, which served the Weeksville community for 123 years. It closed its doors in 2005.
“It’s a part of my family history,” Blackman said. “My mother was born in St. Mary’s Hospital in 1926. I was born in St. Mary’s Hospital in 1944.”
“You’re Weeksville,” Knight said. “And look at that. There are the stories we get.”
The recent $6 million funding has been transformational for Weeksville. The institution is taking steps to expand its staff’s capacity to carry out educational offerings like the launch of a co-led partnership with school leaders and educators of P.S. 243, The Weeksville School, to provide students with a more in-depth cultural history of Weeksville through specialized tours that focus on the “intentionality of the green spaces” that were created, maintained and preserved around the houses.
P.S. 243 is the “direct descendant” of Colored School No. 2, a school founded by Weeksville residents for their children. The legacy school opened in 1839 and was one of the first integrated schools in New York, serving African American and Irish and German immigrant students. This is an example of how the Heritage Center aims to bring the history central to its mission to more New Yorkers, according to Adjoa Jones De Alemid, the director of education at Weeksville Heritage Center.
Jones De Alemid expressed that part of her team’s priority is to increase visibility for the Heritage Centers educational offerings, including their “collection and archives, artists-in-residence and curator-in-residence” and find better ways to “fully ground the legacy of Weeksville” with educational partners.
Jones De Alemid said the Heritage Center will “prioritize three pillars of work”: development of its K-12 education program beyond single tours of the Hunterfly Road Houses to immersive learning experiences that align with New York City’s core curriculum like beekeeping, so that youth can gain a richer history of the experiences of African American life pre-civil war through urbanization; expansion of its community engagement through a 10-month-long afterschool program in public housing that centers creative expression and performing arts, from the Kingsborough Houses to two additional complexes in Brooklyn; and broadening its public humanities pathways for artists and academics interested in exploring the legacy of Weeksville and how it connects to contemporary themes such as environmental justice and abolition. The Heritage Center is considering relaunching the Joan Maynard lecture series as part of this work.
The Weeksville Heritage Center staff is hoping to be able to help the historic site continue its long legacy. The growing staff is currently in the process of implementing tiered program rollouts, starting with strengthening its K-12 educational partnerships and thinking about early childhood development and engaging new schools beyond Brooklyn. The Heritage Center is actively figuring out the mission for the next five years.
“Weeksville today offers a vision for all of us,” Judith Wellman, the author of Brooklyn’s Promised Land: The Free Black Community of Weeksville New York, said. “It offers a model of what determined people can do from the ground up to create communities that work for everyone. It also illustrates how much we can learn about the past when we really begin to look.”
About the author(s)
Danielle Cooper is a master's student at the Columbia School of Journalism.