An ongoing project to preserve one of the last structures from a neighborhood, built by and for free Black people in Bridgeport during the 19th century, is getting additional funding for restoration work.
The Mary and Eliza Freeman houses will receive funding from the African American Cultural Action Fund, according to Synfoni Bailey-Green, the architect for the project and a principal at Northeast Collaborative Architects.
“Currently, we have completed new concrete foundations,” Bailey-Green said. “The house is attached to them, sitting on them. We don't have to have shoring or anything to hold up the remaining upper portions of the house, which is wonderful news, and so this specific grant is going to allow us to continue with that stabilization, especially on the front facade.”
The African American Cultural Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation has awarded the Mary and Eliza Freeman Center for History and Community, which owns the Mary and Eliza Freeman Houses a $140,000 grant, according to Stacey Vairo, a circuit rider for Preservation Connecticut.
The houses are on the list of 27 historic Black sites across the country receiving over $3 million from the nonprofit.
Bailey-Green said there’s still no specific end date for restoration efforts, but the homes, when fully restored, will serve the community.
“Eliza Freeman's house will be a resiliency center, and it's going to focus on climate justice, and community engagement. So we really see it as a place for the community to use, to come in and meet at, to gather information that helps them moving forward,” Bailey-Green said.
The Mary Freeman house, Bailey-Green said, would be a museum dedicated to the lives and legacy of the Freeman sisters. The houses are located in what is now the South End section, a majority non-white neighborhood, which according to the city, has long experienced regular flooding.
The funding will help with restoration efforts, but Vairo said Maisa Tisdale, who is the president and CEO of The Mary & Eliza Freeman Center for History and Community, is still seeking additional money; the project is estimated to cost around $7 million in total.
“That gap in funding is really crucial to close because Maisa has worked tirelessly for years to set up other sources of funding that are available to us, but those are earmarked for subsequent phases of the project once stabilization is complete,” Vairo said.
Tisdale was not available for comment.
Many residents and people with ties to the area are waiting excitedly for the completion of the project. One of them is Donald Smart. Smart, who was born in Bridgeport's neighboring town of Stratford, has a personal connection to the neighborhood. Smart said his parents lived in the area during the late 1940s.
But a few decades later, the area, and the homes, had fallen on hard times, according to Smart.
“Going back to the 70s, the 80s, as the neighborhood began to literally deteriorate, you still had some structural integrity.” Smart said. You didn't have any curb appeal. It was almost as if the area was abandoned.”
Back in the 19th century, the homes belonged to Eliza and Mary Freeman. Well off, the women built the homes in the 1840s and rented them out to tenants.
The Freemans were well known and respected in their neighborhood. According to the Bridgeport Public Library, when Mary Freeman died in 1883, she was considered one of the richest women in Bridgeport.
Erica Smith-Goetz, the co-director of the African American Cultural Action Fund said the homes’ existence dispels historic myths about African Americans.
While the national trust does preserve sites with ties to slavery, it’s also important to learn just how varied the African American experience was in the 19th century, according to Smith-Goetz.
“A free community that was thriving, and standing as an example of success in business, in education, in healthcare,” Smith-Goetz said. “It's truly precious to have not just for Connecticut, but for the entire country, to have an example of that side of African American life at the time."
By the 1990s, the homes also began to gain national interest. In 1999, the sites were officially included in the National Register of Historic Places.
In 2010, the Freeman Center acquired the homes from the city of Bridgeport. By 2025, restoration work finally began.
According to Smith-Goetz, the preservation efforts help upend assumptions about history’s value and importance in everyday life.
It can also help shape how a resident's own neighborhood is remembered.
“This is an activity for all of us, and we can all be preservationists if we so choose,” Smith-Goetz said.
