Nina Simone’s childhood home in Tryon, North Carolina has been restored.
As of late 2025, the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund announced it completed restorations of the house, helping preserve not just Simone’s everlasting influence on music, but also the physical spaces she is tied to. This comes after the property was abandoned and at risk of demolition in the 2010s. A collective of Black artists—including Adam Pendleton, Ellen Gallagher, Julie Mehretu, and Rashid Johnson—swooped in to buy the house for $95,000 in 2017.
“Physical spaces carry memory in a way that transcends words. Nina Simone’s Childhood Home isn’t just a structure; it’s a vessel of her spirit, her struggle, and her genius,” Chicago-born conceptual artist Johnson said in a press release. “Preserving it gives us a place to return to. It reminds us that creativity, resistance, and beauty are born somewhere real—in rooms, on porches, in the intimacy of lived experience.”
After the collective saved the house, they made way for a larger, concerted effort to restore and preserve the space in partnership with Simone’s brother, Dr. Samuel Waymon, and the Action Fund, which is a division of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Venus Williams even got involved in 2023 to help fundraise and continue momentum.
Simone’s childhood home was built in the early 1900s, where she, her eight siblings, and her parents lived between 1933 and 1937. It’s a 650-square-foot space with three bedrooms, and a towering magnolia tree in the front yard. That nearly hundred-year-old timber still stands. Parts of the original wood walls remain. Inside looks less like a museum and feels more like a home. It’s as close to the original as possible, according to Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and strategic advisor to the CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Now that restoration is complete, the Action Fund announced it hopes to open doors to visitors in 2027. This project offers hope and optimism, coming together at a time when attacks on DEI from the current administration have resulted in various attacks on the preservation of Black history and, as a result, erasing American cultural heritage.
What we preserve is a symbol of what we honor and value. For Leggs, “Nina Simone’s childhood home is an essential landmark in our nation’s artistic and cultural landscape. Restoring her home affirms her rightful place in the American story—one defined by brilliance, resilience, and the power of art to shape our collective conscience.”