Maison Freetown

Where the stories of Lafayette's African American community will be preserved for generations to come

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The property on which La Maison Creole de Freetown museum sits is shared by an oak tree that wears the magnificence of centuries. The canopy extends over the block of Lafayette’s historic Freetown neighborhood, situated on property that was once part of Louisiana Governor Alexandre Mouton’s Ile Copal sugar plantation, and just around the corner from Good Hope Hall—a Black-only gathering place and venue during the Jim Crow era, where Louis Armstrong performed dozens of times, while white audiences listened outside. 

“A lot of times when I’m on the property, I think of the many lives [the tree has] seen,” said Maison Freetown Founder and Executive Director Erica Melancon Fox in a December 2023 interview with Sara Barkouli at StoryCorps. “I just wonder about all the stories it has seen and experienced and knows, and the secrets it holds.” 

Fox opened La Maison Creole de Freetown, or “Maison Freetown” as it has come to be known, in 2022 after years of promoting the idea of a cultural center/museum focused on Lafayette’s African American history to various civic entities. “It just never really landed or went anywhere,” she said in an interview in May. “People would say it’s part of the ten-year plan, on their radar. But then ten years passed, and I’m looking around, like, ‘where is this?’” 

A professional vocalist who found success on the West Coast, Fox had been inspired by the celebrations of diversity there, and the institutions in place to explore those identities and histories. “And I would come home,” a place she knew was rife with rich and complicated histories, “and just be left looking for that.” 

“If you walk through the neighborhood, you’ll see these hints of the past, little rings on the sidewalk where they used to tie up their horses. People who have written their names in the concrete.” —Erica Melancon Fox

In 2021, Fox opened a consignment shop in downtown Lafayette with a focus on cultural intersections and inclusivity, elevating the artisanship of local people of color. Called Attakapas Collective, the store’s culture was designed to replicate that of Lafayette’s past life as an Indigenous trading post called “Pinsahuk”—which brought together various tribes, as well as French, English, and Spanish traders. “As more and more people patronized the shop, I saw that people were thirsty for the knowledge beneath the surface,” she said, describing how after someone would buy a piece of jewelry, they’d stick around for thirty minutes discussing the history of Lafayette, asking about the origins of the word “Attakapas”—which refers to the Indigenous Attakapa-Ishak people who have historically called the region home. “It was just this beautiful breeding ground for conversation around topics of heritage and culture, and it kind of emboldened me to say, ‘You know what, this museum needs to happen.’” And she decided she would do it herself, if she had to.

Fox started looking around town for a larger space—envisioning somewhere she could move the Collective, and build her museum around it. Then one day, after driving down from where her shop stood on E. Vermilion, all the way to the end of the street in the heart of the historically Black Freetown neighborhood, she found the circa-1920s home beneath the oak tree, for sale. 

Fox describes Freetown as a place where the history is screaming from the pavement, hoping someone will listen. “If you walk through the neighborhood, you’ll see these hints of the past, little rings on the sidewalk where they used to tie up their horses. People who have written their names in the concrete.” 

Many of the people who live in Freetown today are descendants of the 120 individuals who were enslaved by Alexandre Mouton at Ile Copale. But even before the Civil War, the area was home to many of Louisiana’s first free people of color; an 1850 census record numbers them at 149. By the time the war was over, “Freetown” was heralded as a safe haven for the formerly enslaved—who came together and built a thriving residential subdivision with specialty shops, churches, a hospital, restaurants, and recreational spaces before such organized infrastructure existed in most places in Louisiana except New Orleans. Alongside the neighborhood’s Black families lived, mostly in harmony, people of various other cultures including Cajuns, Jews, Lebanese, and Spanish residents—making Freetown one of Louisiana’s only integrated communities in the Jim Crow era. 

Fox’s own family has connections to Freetown. Her mother grew up there, and it’s where her parents met. “So, I guess if there wasn’t a Freetown, I might not be here,” she laughed. She remembers hearing her grandfather tell stories about helping to build the railroad that runs through the neighborhood, and how he traveled the world even though he couldn’t read or write. In her journal from when she was seven years old, there is an entry regarding something her grandmother told her, something that sparked her interest. “She would say, ‘We’re really Moutons, but at the time you couldn’t take the name of a white man.’” Decades later, Fox would discover her own lineage’s connection to Alexandre Mouton’s family—some of whom lived in the very home where she now operates Maison Freetown. 

“I believe in a higher source,” Fox told Barkouli in December. “And I feel like the ancestors, and some other source, want this work to be done. Even down to the placement of where [the museum ended up], that was not my decision. I just listen.” 

Setting her cultural center and museum in Freetown gave Fox a profound opportunity to directly engage, in real time and place, with the impact that community has had, and continues to have, on the history of Lafayette and Louisiana as a whole. “We saw that there were a lot of hidden histories tied to that community, those unheard voices of people that not only worked on the plantation but then later became workers on the railroad, as well as many of the entrepreneurs and businesspeople who worked to build that community up,” said Fox. Landing where she did, she says she “couldn’t have written a better story.” 

To tie an even stronger knot between the threads of the neighborhood’s past and present, Fox re-established the True Friends Society—an organization originally founded as a benevolence group in Freetown in the 1880s. “They were established to help formerly enslaved people adapt to new life as free people,” explained Fox. In addition to helping fund things like burials and funerals, or raising money through fish fries and cook-offs when someone was behind on rent, the Society developed a remarkable system of thwarting violence and terrorism by organizations like the KKK. “We had a very ugly time in Lafayette, unfortunately,” said Fox. The True Friends Society would anticipate planned attacks, and gather at the homes of targeted families with farm tools and other weapons in hand. “It was because of these Friends being neighbors that people were able to sustain themselves through some of those difficult, challenging times.” 

Today, Fox’s iteration of the True Friend Society of Lafayette, which operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, holds fast to these traditions of uplifting one’s community by “continuing that legacy of just helping each other in whatever way we can” and acting as administrative “keepers” of Maison Freetown. 

Inside the museum, visitors can wander through the historic home, with its rooms featuring changing exhibits such as an elaborate display of Lafayette’s Mardi Gras Indian costumes or a tribute to iconic Creole musicians, interspersed with work by local artists of color. The hallway at the home’s center acts as a dedicated gallery space, with a quarterly rotation of artworks provided by local arts collective Basin Arts through their Bare Walls Program. And one room acts as the continuation of Fox’s Attakapas Collective, a marketplace of artisan goods—from jewelry, to soap, to hot sauce—by almost thirty Louisiana makers of color. 

Extending the museum’s offerings to the little building next door, Fox partnered last spring with Dr. Lindsay Gary of the Houston-based Afrikanah Book Club to open a bookstore carrying exclusively books written by Black women authors from around the globe. “Everything we do is very intentional,” said Fox. “That was something we could not do at one time—we (Black women) weren’t allowed to read, much less write, books. So we’re now elevating those voices.” 

More than a museum, though, Maison Freetown has become an established gathering place in the Lafayette community, a place where artists and culture bearers have shared meals to brainstorm new initiatives, where traiteurs have presented reflections on healing, where folks come and sit on the porch to listen to local musicians jam it out, and where people come to speak the nearly-lost languages with each other at weekly French and Kouri Vini tables. 

“I feel it in my core that these unvoiced people, they want to be heard.” —Erica Melancon Fox

Without funding from the state or local governments as of now, Fox operates Maison Freetown entirely from volunteer hours and donations—with some of the cost offset by the bed and breakfast hosted on the museum’s second floor.

“Passion overrides any obstacles,” she said. “For the last three years, we’ve sustained within our own will and our own power. Just making it happen.” 

Besides the exhibitions and community initiatives, though, the heart of Fox’s work at Maison Freetown lies in her vision for the space as a repository of Lafayette history, especially its Black history. “Archiving is so important to what Maison Freetown is,” she said. Shortly after opening the museum in 2022, Fox was awarded funding at that year’s 24 Hour Citizen Project event to pursue her “Freetown Community Sound Lab” Project—which established a space in the museum dedicated to preserving field recordings and oral histories collected by Fox and other community members, including archeologist Sadie Whitehurst, culture bearer Kelsie LaFontaine, and journalist Ruth Foote, who grew up blocks away from Maison Freetown. 

“So we’ve been going out into the community and documenting oral stories of citizens and neighbors, particularly those over eighty,” said Fox. “It’s not easy for African Americans to do research, because there’s so much missing. And we’re working hard to kind of fill in those gaps.” 

So far, Fox and her partners have collected over four hundred stories—many of them through a recent partnership with KRVS and the oral history nonprofit StoryCorps, which set up a recording pop-up at Maison Freetown in November and December, 2023 as part of its Mobile Tour. An ongoing project is the creation of an interactive mobile map of Freetown, which would facilitate a virtual tour with guides to historically-significant spots. “And what we’re working on now,” said Fox, “is to embed some of these voices and the conversations we’ve had into that map, so you can hear the voices of the people as you walk through the neighborhood.” 

Fox describes her role at Maison Freetown as a “reluctant curator”. In her December interview with Barkouli, Fox said that if she was living the dream she’d always envisioned “I’d be off singing, being Beyonce,” she laughed. “She’s living my life.” But she feels deeply that she’s been brought back to Freetown for a reason. “I feel it in my core that these unvoiced people, they want to be heard.” 

In honor of Juneteenth later this month, Maison Freetown will unveil a new exhibition focusing on Black history in Lafayette Parish’s school system—particularly at the circa-1896 Paul Breaux School, one of the first schools in the area opened for African American students. Learn more about Maison Freetown at maisonfreetown.org.