It is located in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, adjacent to the historically Black American Abiel Smith School, now also part of the museum.

At the public dedication on December 6, 1806, the first-floor pews were reserved for all those "benevolently disposed to the Africans," while the black members sat in the balcony of their new meeting house.

He sought funding from the community, including Black American sailors, to pay for expenses to run the school.

[4] Besides inspiring Boston's Black Americans to pursue justice and quality in education, the school offered them opportunities for employment and economic growth, which in turn provided funds for future generations of Black American Bostonians to pursue higher education.

This funding request required an accounting of persons who worked on and supplied materials to the construction project and documents that both African-American and white laborers contributed to it.

This accounting lists, for example, that the white carpenter Amos Penniman worked on the African Meeting House.

This research has not yet located this document, but it does substantiate that Abel Barbadoes did masonry work on the building, as Chloe Thomas, then a resident of the Home for Aged Colored Women, told George Ruffin in 1883:[9] I heard from the lips of some of our most honored fathers, Cato Gardner, Father Primus Hall, Hamlet Earl, Scipio Dalton, Peter G. Smith, G.H.

He invented it for the purpose of carrying bricks and mortar to build our meeting house with as he was a mason and calculated to do his part to the best of his ability.

He was the father of Mrs. Catherine Barbadoes at 27 Myrtle Street.The façade of the African Meeting House is an adaptation of a design for a townhouse published by Boston architect Asher Benjamin.