Freetown began under a cotton tree with Nova Scotian settlers
On eleven March seventeen ninety-two, one thousand one hundred ninety-six African Americans guided by Lieutenant John Clarkson dedicated Free Town at the foot of a great cotton tree. Temne and Loko villages already ringed the estuary; the new colony became Sierra Leone's capital and Atlantic deep-water port.
An earlier seventeen eighty-seven Province of Freedom at Granville Town, sent by London's Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor under Jonas Hanway and Granville Sharp, burned in seventeen eighty-nine under King Jimmy. Thomas Peters then lobbied the Sierra Leone Company; Clarkson recruited more than one thousand one hundred Black Loyalists tired of Nova Scotia's cold and discrimination. Fifteen ships reached St. George Bay between twenty-six February and nine March seventeen ninety-two; sixty-four settlers died en route. Men cleared forest to the Ceiba pentandra while women waited aboard, then the company christened Free Town after a thanksgiving service under the tree.
Surveyors laid American-style grid streets such as Water Street. By seventeen ninety-eight some three to four hundred houses mixed stone foundations with wooden upper stories that later inspired Creole bod oses. French pillage in seventeen ninety-four forced a rebuild. In eighteen hundred about five hundred fifty Jamaican Maroons helped suppress a Nova Scotian rebellion and won their own Maroon Town district. Krio remains the city's main lingua franca even though no single ethnic group exceeds about twenty-seven percent of residents.
The twenty twenty-four census counted one million three hundred forty-seven thousand five hundred fifty-nine people. Economy still turns on one of the world's largest natural deep-water harbours in the Sierra Leone River estuary. Mayor Yvonne Aki Sawyerr took office eleven May twenty eighteen and won again in twenty twenty-two. Formal founding is seventeen ninety-two, even though bicentennial fireworks fired in nineteen eighty-seven for the Black Poor venture. Freedom was the brand; the cotton tree was the deed.
Source: Freetown
