Because of its significance, the museum was identified as one of the first 26 sites included by the state in 2008 on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.
In 1868 the city had elected Pierre Caliste Landry, an attorney and Methodist minister, as the first African-American mayor in the United States.
After the war, freedmen left rural areas for Donaldsonville to gather in community and establish trades and businesses; it had the third-largest black population of any city in the state.
Hambrick was able to relocate buildings to the site which have historic significance in area history: the first black elementary school in Ascension Parish, the meeting house of an early African-American insurance agency, and the African Plantation house, owned by the first African-American doctor in the parish.
[3] The museum has developed exhibits about black inventors, jazz musicians, and community and political leaders from the area.