Every day in Donaldsonville, thousands of people drive along Marchand Drive, passing mere feet from a legendary music and social venue that hosted the likes of Fats Domino and King Oliver, the man who mentored Louis Armstrong.

A two-story structure on Lessard Street, True Friends Hall was built in the early 1900s by the True Friends Benevolent Association, a fraternal society of Black men in the community. The building acted as a community hub until it closed in the 1980s, but it remains the oldest and largest existing benevolent society hall in Louisiana.

For decades, it had been fading away. And Charles Peters, a renovation specialist who recently stabilized the building, said the structure was close to being lost completely.

“It was getting ready to fall down; I’ll put it like that,” he said. “But I realized the material that the building was made out of was genuine. It was made out of lumber from trees that may have been 200 years old, 100 years old, before they were cut. So that’s why I said the building was worth putting back together. It was worth putting back together.”

Now, a more than $2.2 million renovation project led by the River Road African American Museum is set to not only restore the building but turn it into a community social hub. Designed by the New Orleans-based architecture firm EskewDumezRipple, the finished venue will have indoor and outdoor performance spaces, a concession booth and upstairs offices.

Darryl Hambrick, executive director of the museum, said the goal is to reopen the space by the end of 2027. Louisiana has allocated around $2.2 million to the project, he added, but it requires 25% of the funds to be matched.

“We do have state allocations, but we need matching funds,” he said. “So, we’re looking for some donors that really want to help us match the funds that we’re going to get from the state.”

Aida Ayuk, an architect with EskewDumezRipple, told an assembled group at the museum on Wednesday that the project was in the design phase and wanted to hear memories from those who experienced the hall during its heyday.

“There’s a lot of stories that we haven’t uncovered yet, a lot of just visual imagery that we’d love to get out of anyone who has ideas of what that space used to look like, what it used to feel like, how you used to feel when you were in it,” she said. “We want to recreate that and we don’t want to recreate it without you all.”

‘Meet at the True Friends Hall’

Benevolent societies existed across south Louisiana and provided community assistance during the Jim Crow era. This frequently took the form of insurance or loans, Hambrick stated, as companies discriminated against Black people.

“You could go to that organization, and they would come to your aid. They would provide burial for you. If you were having a wedding and a marriage, they would make sure that you had the space,” he said. “So, it was a community-based center for social, civic and benevolent opportunities.”

The True Friends Hall served as a central meeting place for the society and community. It was built in phases and included a barber shop on each side, a main dance floor, and an upstairs area for private society meetings.

“If there was something going on in the community and there needed to be an emergency gathering, or crisis or celebration, they would say meet at the True Friends Hall,” he said. “It would be a safe place where they knew they had the privacy.”

‘It was perfection’

Its social scene was just as important. The hall was part of the Chitlin’ Circuit, a network of performance spaces that accepted African American performers during the era of racial segregation, and it hosted acts including Fats Domino, Plas Johnson — who played the Pink Panther cartoon theme — and King Oliver.

“This was a place where Black artists could travel, be housed and fed in an environment where segregation was a part of their lifestyle,” Hambrick said. “It was separate, it was safe and it was theirs. You couldn’t stay in hotels, restaurants, and various places … so if you came to the True Friends Hall, you got a place to stay.”

Varnel Jackson Sr. grew up in Hohen Solms and played the trombone with the Leonard Julien’s Orchestra from 1955 to around 1960. Led by Modeste resident Leonard Julien, the band included Julian’s son, nephews, friends and Jackson’s father, Clinton, who had the nickname “Sing Do.”

Jackson, 87, remembered playing at least twice at True Friends Hall.

“We would play there and we would take turns going to take a dance with our girlfriends who were sitting there in the audience, waiting and looking at us and listening to us play,” he said, laughing.

He added that the dances there were so lively that his shirt would get soaked in sweat as the night progressed.

“We would dance so much,” he said. “I would go to the boys’ room wearing a shirt, take it off and wring it and put it back on and go back out and dance.”

At Wednesday’s meeting, former state legislator Roy Quezaire Jr. said he remembered sneaking out to watch the balls through the building’s windows.

“My brother, God rest his soul, and my cousin and the boys in the neighborhood, we would sneak around and come out in the evening and get the milk carts and crates and stand on the side of the building and look through the window,” he said. “And you would see the ladies in the gowns and the gentlemen in the tuxedos and the way they waltzed and danced, it seemed as though they were just gliding, just gliding because it was perfection.”