Weeksville
Dr. Susan Maria Smith McKinney-Steward (1870) / Photographs & Prints Division, Schomburg Center
Dr. McKinney-Steward was born in Weeksville in March 1847 and became the first African American woman New Yorker to earn a medical degree. McKinney-Steward graduated as class valedictorian in 1869 at the New York Medical College for Women. She was motivated to enter medicine after the death of her brother in the Civil War and the 1866 cholera epidemic that affected Brooklyn.
Books & Clippings
Villages & Sections - Weeksville : clippings
Clipping and miscellaneous material about the Weeksville section of Brooklyn, NY.
- Weeksville, Then & Now: The Search to Discover, the Effort to Preserve, Memories of Self in Brooklyn, New York
Weeksville was a nineteenth century African American community located in the Ninth Ward of Brooklyn, New York. It was named for James Weeks, a Black man who purchased land there in 1838 from the Lefferts family estate.... The goal of the "Society for the Preservation of Weeksville and Bedford-Stuyvesant History" is to restore four 19th Century buildings. The buildings still existing in the area will house as educational facility and museum of African-American History of the earlier community. --- excerpt from book's Introduction
Brooklyn's Promised Land by
Tells the riveting narrative of the growth, disappearance, and eventual rediscovery of one of the largest free black communities of the nineteenth century In 1966 a group of students, Boy Scouts, and local citizens rediscovered all that remained of a then virtually unknown community called Weeksville: four frame houses on Hunterfly Road. The infrastructure and vibrant history of Weeksville, an African American community that had become one of the largest free black communities in nineteenth century United States, were virtually wiped out by Brooklyn's exploding population and expanding urban grid. Weeksville was founded by African American entrepreneurs after slavery ended in New York State in 1827. Located in eastern Brooklyn, Weeksville provided a space of physical safety, economic prosperity, education, and even political power for its black population, who organized churches, a school, orphan asylum, home for the aged, newspapers, and the national African Civilization Society. Notable residents of Weeksville, such as journalist and educator Junius P. Morell, participated in every major national effort for African American rights, including the Civil War. Drawing on maps, newspapers, census records, photographs, and the material culture of buildings and artifacts, Wellman reconstructs the social history and national significance of this extraordinary place. Through the lens of this local community, Brooklyn's Promised Land highlights themes still relevant to African Americans across the country.
Gotham by
To European explorers, it was Eden, a paradise of waist-high grasses, towering stands of walnut, maple, chestnut, and oak, and forests that teemed with bears, wolves, raccoons, beavers, otters, and foxes. Today, it is the site of Broadway and Wall Street, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, and the home of millions of people, who have come from every corner of the nation and the globe. In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. Readers will relive the tumultuous early years of New Amsterdam under the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant's despotic regime, Indian wars, slave resistance and revolt, the Revolutionary War and the defeat of Washington's army on Brooklyn Heights, the destructive seven years of British occupation, New York as the nation's first capital, the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Erie Canal and the coming of the railroads, the growth of the city as a port and financial center, the infamous draft riots of the Civil War, the great flood of immigrants, the rise of mass entertainment such as vaudeville and Coney Island, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the birth of the skyscraper. Here too is a cast of thousands--the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Clement Moore, who saved Greenwich Village from the city's street-grid plan; Herman Melville, who painted disillusioned portraits of city life; and Walt Whitman, who happily celebrated that same life. We meet the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Boss Tweed and his nemesis, cartoonist Thomas Nast; Emma Goldman and Nellie Bly; Jacob Riis and Horace Greeley; police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt; Colonel Waring and his "white angels" (who revolutionized the sanitation department); millionaires John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont, and William Randolph Hearst; and hundreds more who left their mark on this great city. The events and people who crowd these pages guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America, and a book that will mesmerize everyone interested in the peaks and valleys of American life as found in the greatest city on earth. Gotham is a dazzling read, a fast-paced, brilliant narrative that carries the reader along as it threads hundreds of stories into one great blockbuster of a book.
Introduction
“In the 1830’s, African American land investors organized the community of Weeksville to provide economic, social, and political rights for African Americans. Located four miles east of downtown Brooklyn, Weeksville grew rapidly, in 1855, with a black population of 521, [it] had become the second largest independent African American community in the United States...Its residents originated in various parts of the United States and the Caribbean. Two came from Africa.
With a high rate of property ownership, [it] became a highly politicized black community, with two newspapers - Freedom’s Torchlight and the National Monitor -- and a host of African American institutions , including several churches, an orphan asylum, and a home for the aged. Weeksville became a major station on the Underground Railroad, and following the Draft Riots, it became a shelter for refugees from the vicious pogrom in Manhattan. [It] also had the first New York City public school to fully integrate its teaching staff.
Today, four frame houses on Hunterfly Road, maintained by the [Weeksville Heritage Center] represent the historic Weeksville community.”
Slavery in New York / Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris
Maps
Chancery sale of real estate belonging to the heirs of Saml. Garrittsen decd. / (1839)
Note - this map shows a large portion of area that would soon become Weeksville
Sidney’s map of twelve miles around New York / J.C. Sidney (1849)
Digital Collections Image
Note - this is the earliest map with the Weeksville toponym at NYPL, also shows outline of Hunterfly Road and building footprints
Plan of the city of Brooklyn, L.I. / William Perris (1855)
Digital Collections Image
Note - although this map was published in 1855 it shows the narrow strips of land and various landowners’ along Hunterfly Rd. who lived in the area at the beginning of the 1800s before it was settled by Weeksville’s black residents
Higginson’s plan of the city of Brooklyn, L.I. / J.H, Higginson (1864)
Digital Collections Image
Note - Baptist Colored Church near corner of Warren & Utica Aves
Map of the city of Brooklyn / M. Dripps (1869)
Digital Collections Image
Note - building footprints along Hunterfly Rd; “Sam. Anderson” [ex-enslaved Brooklynite] who lived near Rochester Ave. and the Flatbush Town line; Public Colored School and Public School. No. 2 on Dean between Troy & Albany Aves; African Baptist Church on Warren St between Utica & Rochester Ave.
Atlas of the entire city of Brooklyn / G.W. Bromley & Co. (1880) pl. 33
Insurance Maps of New York, Brooklyn / Sanborn Map Co. (1888) Vol. 7 pl. 169, pl. 170
Digital Collections Image plate 169 & plate 170
Note - plate 169: Colored School No. 2, Zion’s Home for the Aged, and Howard Colored Orphan Asylum on the block bound by Troy, Dean, Bergen, and Albany Ave; plate 170: African Baptist Church and Union Bethel Church on Dean St. between Troy and Schenectady Ave.
Digital Collections Image plate P & plate I
Note - plate P: contemporary street grid covering former Hunterfly Rd. (dotted). Also note Colored Church on Prospect Pl. between Utica & Rochester Aves [block 176, lot 17]; plate I: Colored Orphan Asylum & School corner of Dean & Troy Ave.
Atlas of the city of Brooklyn / Bromley (1893) pl. 24
Note - houses along former Hunterfly Road on block bound by Bergen , Rochester, St. Marks and Buffalo Ave.
Atlas of the Brooklyn borough of the City of New York / H. Ullitz (1898-99) pl.18
Digital Collections Image
Note - contemporary street grid covering former Hunterfly Rd. (dotted). Also note Colored Church on Prospect Pl. between Utica & Rochester [block 1367, lot 79]