Conservation Fund saves Selma’s historic Edistone Hotel from the wrecking ball

The Conservation Fund announced Wednesday that it is stepping in to protect the historic but endangered Edistone Hotel in downtown Selma.

The historic hotel and market for enslaved people was set to be demolished. The Conservation Fund announced Sept. 10 that it is now working to secure the Edistone Hotel’s long-term protection as it makes plans for the historic site’s future.

The Conservation Fund worked with MASS Design Group, a Boston-based architecture firm that specializes in projects that promote justice and human dignity, to develop renderings of the site. Based on feedback from community listening sessions, the renderings reimagine the Edistone as a museum, co-working space and grocery store as part of Selma’s downtown revitalization, according to a news release from The Conservation Fund.

“The Edistone Hotel is part of the people’s public memory in downtown Selma and has the potential to be a collaborative case for how memorializing the past can be a catalyst for our shared futures, delivering resources and amenities for city residents and visitors, while honoring and acknowledging the location’s profound history,” said Jha D Amazi, principal at MASS Design Group. “We are honored to work with The Conservation Fund to help make this historical location a place to honor memory while revitalizing and activating the site in ways that build new collective capacities for the community.”

Selma Redevelopment Authority Executive Director Sarah Aghedo described efforts to preserve the Edistone Hotel as “a rollercoaster of delight and despair.” 

“Since 2022, when the National Trust for Historic Preservation provided funding for the hotel’s structural documentation, we have wondered if this Alabama ‘Place in Peril’ would be restored to tell its multi-layered history,” Aghedo said. “We are grateful The Conservation Fund was able to purchase the hotel, supporting the many private efforts to secure its future.”

Built in 1855, the building links together stories of American tragedy, triumph and perseverance, according to The Conservation Fund release. Before the Civil War, the site served as the location for Dallas County’s largest market for enslaved people. During Reconstruction, it housed the Freedman’s Bureau, which was established by Congress after the Civil War to provide food, clothing and shelter for newly freed African Americans.

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In the 1870s, the hotel proprietor offered equal accommodation to patrons, regardless of race. The Edistone Hotel is steps from the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where in 1965 more than 500 civil rights marchers were beaten on their way to Montgomery, now memorialized as Bloody Sunday.

“It’s unfathomable that the Edistone Hotel, a place so rich in American history, came so close to being lost forever,” said Phillip Howard, manager of the Legacy Places Initiative for The Conservation Fund. “As the site of the Freedman’s Bureau after the Civil War, you can imagine that the Edistone Hotel was one of the first places a formerly enslaved person in the South would have been treated like a human.”

“By saving the Edistone Hotel, we’re not just protecting the physical location,” Howard said. “We’re protecting the stories and legacies of all those that passed through its doors, or stood at this site, and are ensuring those stories live on as part of our shared American history.”

There are thousands of historic African American sites across the country that are at risk of being lost forever to time, development or indifference, according to The Conservation Fund. The Conservation Fund is working with local communities and partners to identify these important places, such as important civil rights sites across the South, homes and farms that made up the Underground Railroad, and locations where priceless American culture was created.

The Edistone Hotel is the latest African American heritage site protected by The Conservation Fund. Other projects include Zora Neale Hurston’s final home, the Chattahoochee Brick Company Memorial Park in Georgia, The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, the protection of formerly segregated beaches in Maryland and the Freedom Riders National Monument in Alabama. 

The Conservation Fund is based in Arlington, Virginia.