The Conservation Fund saves the Historic Edistone Hotel in Downtown Selma

The Edistone Hotel, a historic downtown Selma, Alabama building, has been saved from demolition by The Conservation Fund, Legacy Places Initiative. 

Built in 1855, 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. 

According to the Alabama Historical Commission (AHC), the three-story brick building remained a hotel well into the 1900s. The last operational business, a barber shop, closed just a few years ago. 

A place Civil Rights history was made 

One of the oldest hotels in Alabama, the Edistone is near the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the location where civil rights marchers were beaten on “Bloody Sunday”—an event that galvanized the nation to support the Voting Rights Act.

“It’s unfathomable that the Edistone Hotel, a place so rich in American history, came so close to being lost forever. 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. 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.” 

Phillip Howard, Manager of the Legacy Places Initiative for The Conservation Fund

What’s next for Edistone?

Named a Place in Peril by the AHC in 2022, The Conservation Fund has teamed up with MASS Design Group, a Boston-based architecture firm that specializes in projects that promote justice and human dignity, to bring back the building. 

Based on feedback from community listening sessions, renderings have been drawn up for the Edistone, reimagining it as a museum, co-working space and grocery store.

The Conservation Fund has significant experience revitalizing African American heritage sites. Other projects include:

• The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, 
• Protection of formerly segregated beaches in Maryland
• Freedom Riders National Monument in Alabama

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