MORE THAN A RESTORATION: Ben Colbert, board chair of the nonprofit Paul Robeson House of Princeton, center, discusses building plans with residents who attended an open house on Saturday, July 4. Once complete, the restored house will expand the organization’s existing programming, which includes concerts, lectures, poetry readings, and educational events celebrating Robeson’s life and legacy. (Photo by Matthew Hersh)
By Matthew Hersh
More than a decade after plans to restore Paul Robeson’s childhood home first took shape, the historic house at 110 Witherspoon Street is entering its final phase of construction, bringing Princeton closer to realizing a long-envisioned community center honoring one of its most distinguished residents.
Visitors got a firsthand look at the progress during an open house on July 4, where board members of the Paul Robeson House of Princeton and lead architect Kevin Wilkes guided tours through the nearly completed building, explaining how years of painstaking restoration have transformed the deteriorated structure into a space that will preserve Robeson’s legacy while serving the community.
The restored three-story wood-frame home is now designed as a living community resource. The first floor — once a bar that served Princeton’s segregated Black community — is transformed into the Robeson Gallery, featuring memorabilia from Paul Robeson and artifacts documenting the history of Princeton’s Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood. Among the glimpses into Princeton’s past include a Princeton-Trenton trolley pass that brought Robeson’s older brother, William, to Trenton each day to attend school, unable to attend Princeton’s then-segregated schools.
Meeting rooms and nonprofit office space will occupy the second floor, while the third floor will provide temporary lodging for immigrants, service workers, visiting scholars, missionaries, and students. A rear courtyard will offer gathering space and a private entrance for residents.
The vision has remained consistent since the nonprofit first announced plans to restore the house, which describes the
project as an effort not simply to preserve a historic building, but to create a center for education, cultural programming, and community engagement rooted in Robeson’s lifelong commitment to social justice.
“This house has been an integral part of the African American community for almost two centuries,” Paul Robeson House Board President Ben Colbert told Town Topics in 2024. “It represents an effort of collaboration … giving the community a focus, a place where it could meet and survive.”
Although organizers had hoped to complete the project earlier, fundraising and the complexity of restoring the historic structure extended the timeline. Reconstruction began in earnest following the COVID-19 pandemic, with work proceeding only as funding became available.
“We have to be very careful because we do not want to be in debt,” Colbert said during Saturday’s tour. “We’ve done this when we’ve had the resources to do it.”
The project has been supported through community donations, private philanthropy, and foundation grants, including funding shared with the Paul Robeson House in Philadelphia through the Mellon Foundation. Colbert noted that longtime supporters and local donors have helped sustain the restoration over many years.
For Wilkes, restoring the house has required equal parts craftsmanship and archaeology.
“There isn’t a single historic photograph of this building,” he told visitors. “The only thing we could do was take things apart, examine them, and figure out what was original.”
That investigative work revealed the home’s original white clapboard siding, hidden behind a chimney added decades after the house was built. The restored exterior, including a reconstructed front porch, reflects what researchers believe the home looked like during Robeson’s childhood.
As crews removed layers of flooring, walls, and ceilings, they uncovered physical evidence of more than a century of life inside the house.
Some upstairs rooms contained as many as 10 layers of flooring, preserving clothing, combs, rings and other personal belongings between each generation of renovations. Workers also discovered evidence from the period when the building served as a boarding house, including a homemade knife and a bullet.
“It’s like reading the history of the building,” Wilkes said.
The restoration has also revealed the evolution of the house itself. Originally constructed as a two-story residence for the pastor of Witherspoon Presbyterian Church, a third floor was added in the late 19th century as architectural tastes changed. Wilkes said traces of gas lighting, early electrical wiring, fireplaces and coal stoves illustrate how successive generations adapted the home to new technologies.
Today, the building stands as one of the most significant surviving landmarks in Princeton’s historic Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood, where Robeson’s father, the Rev. William Drew Robeson, served as pastor of Witherspoon Presbyterian Church.
Colbert said preserving the house also helps preserve the neighborhood’s history.
“That’s part of the reason why we wanted a restoration project,” he said. “To keep the integrity of the neighborhood.”
Once complete, the restored house will expand the organization’s existing programming, which includes concerts, lectures, poetry readings, and educational events celebrating Robeson’s life and legacy. The nonprofit also collaborates with Robeson organizations in Trenton and Philadelphia and sponsors the Paul Robeson Scholars and Fellows program, supporting students and community leaders engaged in public service and social justice initiatives. Income generated by the residential component will help sustain those programs, though Colbert emphasized that serving the community — not generating revenue — remains the organization’s primary goal.
Wilkes said the restoration represents more than the rehabilitation of a historic building. It reflects a broader effort to restore Robeson’s place in American history after decades in which his reputation was overshadowed by political persecution during the McCarthy era.
“It’s taken a while to break through those clouds and restore his place in history,” Wilkes said. “I feel this project is part of that.”