Three of their leaders were Alonzo Hoggard, Solomon York and Richard Rayner. Their progress was described by a visitor who arrived skeptical but left impressed.
Hoggard, for example, had “no assistance from native boys, no aid but four small sons, and with them alone he has planted out five thousand coffee trees and is cultivating one-and-a-half acres in potatoes, two acres in cassava, four acres in rice, one-half acre in eddoes, besides many garden vegetables.” He also had eight hogs.
Within three years, York had “nearly three thousand coffee trees growing, many bearing, and a large supply of cassavas, eddoes, and other bread stuff.” Rayner, too, had planted a large lot of coffee. He also had “some acres of sugar-cane, some ginger, and his wife offers to sell a few barrels of Indian corn, the result of her own industry.”
Footnote: “Arthington, Liberia,” African Repository, Nov. 1873, p. 337.
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