James Weldon Johnson's Writing Cabin Prepares for Spring
"Hanging by a Thread: The Retreat of James Weldon Johnson." It was this stark title of an article in Preservation Massachusetts that caught Jill Rosenberg Jones’ attention after googling the phrase “James Weldon Johnson Great Barrington,” five words that came to her while daydreaming about purchasing a country home. The year was 2010, and Jones’s mentor and the former literary executor of James Weldon Johnson’s estate, Sondra Kathryn Wilson, had just passed away, naming Jill as the new literary executor. Seven days after reading the article, Jill and her husband Rufus visited the home and small writing cabin tucked further back on the property and offered to buy it.
The Johnson home went on the market in the summer of 2009, but because of its need for substantial repairs and lack of historic protections, concerned community members feared it would be demolished. The realtor of the property and the author of the Preservation Massachusetts article organized a small public relations campaign around the property, hoping to find a buyer interested in preserving the Johnson house and cabin. The Joneses were a match made in heaven. Not only was Jill the new literary executor of Johnson’s works, she and Rufus had co-produced the James Weldon Johnson Medal ceremony at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (under Sondra’s guidance) for years.
Most people know James Weldon Johnson as the lyricist of ‘Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,’ a powerful and inspiring hymn colloquially known as the “Black national anthem.” It experienced a pop-culture resurgence after Beyonce opened her 2018 Coachella festival performance with a stirring rendition of the hymn just before launching into her mega hit “Formation.” Although the cultural impact of ‘Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing’ can’t be understated, Johnson was so much more than one poem-turned-song.
“I was familiar with [Johnson] for Lift Every Voice and Sing and that's about it,” laughs Rufus Jones, now president of the James Weldon Johnson Foundation. “It wasn’t until I began to read about this polymath, this Renaissance man with so many talents that I learned more.”
photo by: Shayla Martin
James Weldon Johnson's writing cabin, exterior
Johnson had a diverse and highly influential career. Starting out as the first Black attorney admitted to the Florida Bar after Reconstruction, he also founded the first Black newspaper in the United States, The Daily American. Finally, he was a diplomat during President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration and served as Executive Secretary of the NAACP, all while writing 200 hit songs for Broadway with his brother in addition to poems and other creative writing.
Today, I sit with Rufus in the dining room the family added to the original home, as he reads to me from Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson. In the book, Johnson describes finding the country home after his doctor's urgent warnings regarding his strenuous schedule as leader of the NAACP:
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“In 1926 I bought a little place in the township of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. I rode one day by an overgrown place where a little red barn was all that stood out amongst the weeds…A bright little river ran under a bridge and circled around behind the barn. On inquiry, I learned that there were five acres in the track and I said, ‘this is just the place for me’...We named the place Five Acres. There we have made our home ever since for part of the year.”
As I stare out of the window at the same bright little river under the bridge that so enamored Johnson, I’m filled with a sense of peace and understanding as to why he and his wife created a haven for themselves here. But Johnson’s former home (now the Jones’s vacation home) is just the start. Rufus, his contractor-historian Alan Petruka, and I bundle up and start toward the tucked away writing cabin, unseen from the main house. It was here that Johnson wrote both his autobiography and his most notable book of poetry – God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, in 1927.
photo by: Shayla Martin
Shayla Martin, AACHAF Editorial Fellow, and the James Weldon Johnson Writing Cabin
“It’s hard to imagine what it looked like when we first found it because it was completely falling down,” says Alan. “We had to rebuild the foundation, the chimney was on the ground and the roof was totally gone. You could stand inside the cabin and see the sky.” The writing cabin’s restored look is thanks to a grant from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund in 2022, which was used to help stabilize and repair it for future use as a writing study and studio for scholars and authors. The grant helped purchase new windows, a cedar rooftop, rebuild the foundation and repair the wood slab siding along the exterior of the property that was all laid by hand.
photo by: Shayla Martin
James Weldon Johnson Home, Exterior
Now, the focus is on the interior, where Rufus and Alan painstakingly pour over pictures and documentation of the cabin from the 1930s to match the fixtures and details as closely as possible. Fortunately, many original items of Johnson’s were in the cabin when the Jones’ purchased Five Acres, though many in varying states of damage. Rufus and Alan show me Johnson’s original, yet crumbling, day bed whose drawers they intend to rebuild, as well as Johnson’s original bookshelf and bathroom sink. They point to a space just below the window where Johnson’s desk once sat, overlooking the beauty of the river – the perfect place to cure a case of writer’s block.
The Jones family plans for the cabin to be completely restored by spring 2025, in time for the foundation’s annual event at Five Acres – Advancing the Legacy VIII: A Celebration of James Weldon Johnson, in June. In addition to allowing invited guests and community members to tour the cabin, the Foundation will announce their 2025 two-week Artist's Residency for “five mid-career and emerging visual artists, writers, scholars whose work exemplifies the values that James Weldon Johnson dedicated his life to: social equity, creative expression, erudition, social justice and community.”
photo by: Shayla Martin
Interior of the James Weldon Johnson Writing Cabin
photo by: Shayla Martin
Inside the cabin, signs detail the site's history and restoration plans
Since 2017, 27 artists have received The James Weldon Johnson Fellowship in the Arts, a residency that includes housing and financial support. This will be the first year that writers will be able to use Johnson’s writing cabin as a space for inspiration and creativity.
“This is a place where James Weldon Johnson felt comfortable in 1926, so there’s something special about the humans in this area called the Berkshires,” says Rufus. “He came here to rest, relax and to create, and now his former writing cabin is going to be beautiful and more accessible for people to share in that.”
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