Free Villages

Free Villages is the term used for Caribbean settlements, particularly in Jamaica, founded in the 1830s and 1840s with land for freedmen independent of the control of plantation owners and other major estates. The concept was initiated by English Baptist missionaries in Jamaica, who raised funds in Great Britain to buy land to be granted to freedmen after emancipation. The planters had vowed not to sell any land to freedmen after slavery was finally abolished in the Empire in 1838; they wanted to retain freedmen as agricultural workers. The Free Villages were often founded around a Baptist church, and missionaries worked to found schools as well in these settlements.

Pioneering the concept

Starting in the 1830s, in anticipation of emancipation from slavery, the Jamaican Baptist congregations, deacons and ministers pioneered the Caribbean concept of Free Villages with the English Quaker abolitionist Joseph Sturge. Many plantation owners and others in the landowning class made it clear they would never sell land to freed slaves, but provide only tied accommodation at the rents they chose. The aim of the estate owners was to prevent free labour choice such as movement between employers, and to keep labour costs low or negligible upon abolition of slavery. To circumvent this, the leaders of predominantly African-Caribbean Baptist chapels worked with their Baptist and Quaker contacts in England to arrange to buy land through land agents in London, in order to avoid detection. They would hold Jamaican land in order to establish Free Villages independent of estate owners.

For example, in 1835, using land agents and Baptist financiers in England, the African-Caribbean congregation of the Rev. James Phillippo (a British Baptist pastor and abolitionist in Jamaica) were able to discreetly purchase land, unbeknown to the plantation owners, in the hills of Saint Catherine parish. Under the scheme, the land became available to the freed slaves upon emancipation, by division into lots at not-for-profit rents, or for full ownership and title, where they could live free from their former masters' control. Phillippo’s success in St. Catherine emboldened him; he founded a Free Village in Oracabessa later that same year.

Jamaica's first Free Village

Henry Lunan, formerly an enslaved headman at Hampstead Estate, purchased the first plot in the very first Free Village or Baptist Free Village at Sligoville (in Saint Catherine parish and named after the Howe Browne, 2nd Marquess of Sligo, the Jamaican Governor at the time of abolition), ten miles north of Spanish Town. In 2007, a plaque was erected at Witter Park, Sligoville on 23 May, as a Labour Day event - to commemorate Jamaica's first Free Village.

Sturge Town was founded in 1838 as a Free Village and still survives. It is a small rural village about 10 miles from Brown’s Town, Saint Ann Parish. The village is located on the northeast coast on the island of Jamaica. It is arguably the first free village in the Western Hemisphere but was registered second.

This village was named after Joseph Sturge (1793-May 1859), an English Quaker and abolitionist from Birmingham, England, who founded the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (now Anti-Slavery International). He worked throughout his life in Radical political actions supporting pacifism, working-class rights, and the universal emancipation of slaves. He sponsored the purchase and settlement of Mt. Abyla, which was divided into village lots and sold to 100 families. One of those families was the Nugents, believed to be descendants of Gov. George Nugent and Lady Maria Nugent. Clarence Nugent married Lucetta Campbell, and they had five children, four girls and one son: Minetta, Cindella, Jean, Enid, and Oscar.

Clarence Nugent may be one of Governor George Nugent’s grandsons. George Nugent, the 1st Baronet, became governor of Jamaica in April 1801. In 1797 he had married Maria Skinner, a daughter of Cortlandt Skinner, the Attorney-General of New Jersey, United States and a descendant of the Schuyler and Van Cortlandt families of British North America. Nugent and Maria had three sons and two daughters together. Lady Nugent wrote a journal of her experiences in Jamaica, which was first published in 1907.

After the enslaved Africans were emancipated in 1834, they helped established two churches in Sturge Town: Phillippo Baptist Church and New Testament Church of God.

Other examples of Free Villages

There are many similar Free Villages in the Caribbean established through the work of Nonconformist chapels. In Jamaica, these include:
*''Buxton

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