The Weeksville Heritage Center is a historic site on Buffalo Avenue between St. Marks Avenue and Bergen Street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York City. It is dedicated to the preservation of Weeksville, one of America's first free black communities during the 19th century. Within this community, the residents established schools, churches and benevolent associations and were active in the abolitionist movement. Weeksville is a historic settlement of national significance and one of the few remaining historical sites of pre-Civil War African-American communities.
Founding members of the preservation group were James Hurley, Dewey Harley, Dolores McCullough, Joan Maynard, and Patricia Johnson. It was founded as the Society for the Preservation of Weeksville and Bedford Stuyvesant in 1970, and then the Weeksville Heritage Center. The Heritage Center focuses on tours, arts and crafts, literacy and historical preservation programs for public-school students. The site is managed by the Weeksville Society, a historical society that maintains the site comprising the historic Hunterfly Houses and an open grassy area.
Exhibits
The museum's main exhibit is the Hunterfly Road Historic District, a national historic district. It consists of four contributing residential buildings, erected no earlier than the 1860s, within the 19th-century free Black community of Weeksville. They were built along a road dating to American Indian tenure of the area; it led to shellfish beds at the Jamaica Bay end of Fresh Kill/Creek. The city began to close sections of Hunterfly Road after 1835. The houses are one and one half to -story wood-frame dwellings.
In 1970 the houses were declared New York City Landmarks, and in 1972 they were listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Hunterfly Road Historic District.
History
Context
In 1838, James Weeks, an African American, bought a plot of land from Henry C. Thompson (another free African American) in the Ninth Ward of central Brooklyn. This was 11 years after the final abolition of slavery in New York State, which had followed a gradual program from early in the nineteenth century. This site was called Weeksville after him.
A 1906 article in the New York Age, recalling the earlier period, said that James Weeks, a stevedore and a respected member of the community, "owned a handsome dwelling at Schenectady and Atlantic Avenues." Weeksville became home to ministers, teachers and other professionals, including the first female African-American physician in New York state, and the first African-American police officer in New York City. The black community in Weeksville developed its own churches, a school, an orphanage, a cemetery, an old age home, an African-American benevolent society, and one of the first African-American newspapers, the Freedman's Torchlight. During the violent New York Draft Riots of 1863, during the Civil War, the community served as a refuge for many African Americans who fled from Manhattan; many resettled in Brooklyn.
Rediscovery and opening
Weeksville was "rediscovered" in 1968 when they found mention of it in a book by a local historian. The search for Historic Weeksville began in 1968 in a Pratt Neighborhood College workshop on Brooklyn and New York City neighborhoods led by James Hurley. Dolores McCullough and Patricia Johnson, two students in the workshop, became active and important contributors to the Weeksville Project. Hurley first read about Weeksville in the book, Brooklyn's Eastern District, by local historian, Eugene Armbruster. Hurley, a local resident, researcher, and former aerial photographer, and Joseph Haynes, a professional engineer, pilot, and long-term resident of Bedford–Stuyvesant, later reconnoitered and photographed the historic houses on Hunterfly Road during an airplane flight over the area. Hurley and Haynes had originally met at the Brooklyn Children's Museum. They had collaborated on creating a walking tour of the area that was sponsored by the Museum of the City of New York. The old lane, located off Bergen Street between Buffalo and Rochester avenues, was a remnant of the colonial Hunterfly Road. Hunterfly Road was at the eastern edge of the 19th-century Weeksville settlement.
