Benefit concerts, Christmas wreath sales and donations are helping to restore the Old Benevolent Society Building in St. Francisville.
Located in the city’s historic district, the small, simple structure is rich in African-American history.
In 2018, the Louisiana Trust for Historic Preservation added the Old Benevolent Society Building to the state’s Most Endangered Places List. The designation brought increased attention to the 147-year-old structure’s need for repairs, said Sara Wilson-Rogers, president of Friends of the Old Benevolent Society Building.
“After it went on the list of endangered places, we realized that all the work that had to be done was going to be quite costly,” Wilson-Rogers said. “Because it wasn’t just repairing, it was restoring it to its original state. It started out that we could do it for $175,000. But then COVID struck and the prices kept going up and up.”
Although Grace Episcopal Church has hosted most of the benefit concerts for the Old Benevolent Building, Friday’s benefit show featuring blues singer-guitarist Lil Jimmy Reed moves to Hemingbough. A native of nearby Hardwood, Reed is delighted about coming home to West Feliciana Parish for the event.
“That’s my hometown,” the musician said from his home in Enterprise, Alabama. “I was raised there and I don’t mind helping.”
The Old Benevolent Society Building housed one of many African-American benevolent societies throughout the South. The societies predated the Civil War, but they became especially important to recently freed Blacks after the war. Well into the 20th century, the benevolent societies provided medical treatment and funeral expenses during the decades of segregation that made those services less accessible to Blacks.
Other benevolent and social halls in Louisiana included the True Friends Benevolent Association Hall in Donaldsonville; Perseverance Benevolent Mutual Aid Association in New Orleans; and Dew Drop Social and Benevolent Hall in Mandeville, a structure on the National Register of Historic Places.
Wilson-Rogers has been helping preserve the Old Benevolent Society Building for decades. In the early 1990s, she co-wrote a grant that obtained funds to replace the front porch.
Before the recent repairs on the building began, Wilson-Rogers regularly attended the Masons-linked Order of the Eastern Star meetings there. During a gathering in December 2016, she noticed something alarming.
“The floor was moving,” she recalled. “So, we checked the building and realized that there were problems,” she said.
A restoration committee for the building formed in 2018. The committee’s architectural advisor, James Dart, determined foundation repair was the first priority, followed by replacement of deteriorating siding. Currently, the windows have been removed so they can be refurbished.
Dart estimates that about $250,000 is needed to cover the entire cost of making the building fully functioning and habitable. It ultimately will serve as an African-American museum.
“It’s a labor of love, for a sweet little building that has been in dire need of help for some time,” he said.
Wilson-Rogers has been impressed at how much support the St. Francisville community has shown the restoration project.
“There’s so much love and support from the people here,” she said. “And the donations coming from people are unexpected. We had been thinking it was going to be years down the road before we got anywhere with this.”
She’s also grateful that the old building she holds dear is no longer ignored and forgotten.
“It was this little building on the side of the road that everybody passed for years,” she said. “Nobody knew what it was — but now just about everybody can tell you what that building is.”