 Interested in history, she had discovered a settlement where free blacks had lived prior to the Civil War and their 1808 African Meeting House, which housed both Boston's first black church and the first segregated public school in the United States.The museum was created to save the site and provide a means to purchase other significant properties for preservation of African-American heritage in the area.Thurman also created a map of important African American historical sites in Boston with the help of her daughter, Anne Chiarenza, which she called "Negro Freedom Trails of Boston".