Settlements founded by and for freed slaves

19 September 2026 · Cartographer expedition

Five places on two continents that people who had been someone else's property bought, petitioned for or crossed an ocean to reach — and then cleared, built and, as far as they were ever allowed, ran for themselves.

The five stops

Stop 1 · Sierra Leone

Freetown

Fifteen ships carrying close to 1,200 Black Loyalists — people who had escaped slavery in the rebelling American colonies and been resettled in Nova Scotia — sailed from Halifax on 15 January 1792 and beat into St George's Bay between 26 February and 9 March, sixty-four of them dead on the passage. On 11 March 1792 the survivors named the place Free Town. Their descendants are the Krio, and the Cotton Tree they gathered under stood over the city until a storm brought most of it down on 24 May 2023.

Stop 2 · Liberia

Monrovia

The American Colonization Society put its settlers ashore on Dozoa — Providence Island, in the mouth of the Mesurado — on 7 January 1822, and they fought their way onto the cape itself that April. They called the place Christopolis at first and renamed it two years later for President James Monroe — one of only two national capitals named after an American president. Independence followed in 1847, declared by a convention of settlers, many of them born into slavery in the United States.

Stop 3 · Canada

Birchtown

Named for Brigadier General Samuel Birch, who signed the certificates of freedom recorded in the Book of Negroes, this was the largest free Black settlement in North America in the 1780s. The Black Loyalist Heritage Centre opened on the site in 2015; about 200 people live here today.

Stop 4 · United States

Nicodemus

The town company was organised on 18 April 1877 by seven Kansans, six of them African American, and drew settlers out of Kentucky into what its circulars called the Promised Land. The Park Service calls it the oldest remaining Black settlement west of the Mississippi; a National Historic Landmark since 1976, it became a National Historic Site in 1996.

Stop 5 · United States

Mound Bayou

Isaiah T. Montgomery and his cousin Benjamin T. Green — both born enslaved on Joseph Davis's Davis Bend plantation, upriver — bought a tract of Delta bottomland and founded the town on 12 July 1887. Montgomery was its mayor from 1888 to 1902. It remains one of the earliest and longest-lived all-Black municipalities in the United States, with about 1,500 residents.

Think you'd have found them? Play today's expedition, or replay this one from the archive.