Category: Buchanan

The city now known as Buchanan began in March 1835. It sits on land bought in 1834 by the Young Men’s Colonization Society of Pennsylvania, a predominantly Quaker group, and the New York Colonization Society.

The town was originally called Bassa Cove based on its location at a sheltered bay at the junction of the St. John’s River and the Benson (a stream). It sits nearly opposite Edina.

Footnote: J. W. Lugenbeel, “Sketches of Liberia – No. 2,” African Repository, July 1850, p. 207.

One month after the town began, a local slave trader attacked the settlement, encouraged by a French slave buyer, killing 20 of the pacifistic repatriates and sacking the town.

A militia of 120 men dispatched by boat from Monrovia, along with indigenous allies, retook the town and forced the chief responsible for its destruction to build it at his own expense.

Some survivors of the attack returned to Bassa Cove later that year and were joined one year later by 200 repatriates, bearing food, clothing and arms from the Pennsylvania and New York colonizationists.

Footnote: Cassell, 1970, p. 106-108; Shick, 1980, p 33.

When a census was taken in 1843, Bassa Cove was home to 124 persons. Four worked in agriculture, six were artisans, five merchants, 23 semiskilled, and 14 unskilled. There was no professional or appointed office holder.

In 1843, 93 residents were members of two local churches. Forty-four were Baptists and 49 Methodists.

When Liberia declared its independence in 1847, the country contained 11 towns. Buchanan was one of them.

Footnote: U. S., Congress, Senate, U. S. Navy Department, tables showing the number of emigrants and recaptured Africans sent to the colony of Liberia by the government of the United States … together with a census of the colony and a report of its commerce, &c. September, 1843: Senate Document No. 150, 28th Cong., 2n sess., 1845.

By 1850, some residents of Buchanan were already growing coffee, arrow-root and ginger for export.

In the last half of the 1800s, Liberia became a major exporter of cultivated coffee, which brought significant wealth to individual growers. That revolution was started in Buchanan by Allen Hooper, a freeborn repatriate from New York, who arrived at age 27 in January 1850.

Footnote: J. W. Lugenbeel, “Sketches of Liberia – No. 2,” African Repository, July 1850, p. 207; African Repository, April 1850, p. 26; “Brewerville and the St. Paul’s River,” African Repository, July 1879, p. 55.

Buchanan was first incorporated as a city in 1860. Ten years later the national legislature set apart a piece of land in the city to be known as Court House Square.

In 1873, the city charter was repealed in response to petitions from residents against oppressive taxation and unconstitutional conduct by city officials. The charter would not be revived until 1880.

Footnote: Acts of the Liberian Legislature, 1873, pp. 13-14.; Acts of the Liberian Legislature, 1880, p. 4; Acts of the Liberian Legislature, 1860, p. 68-70; 1860, p. 76; Acts of the Liberian Legislature, 1870, pp. 14-15.

In 1878, the national legislature voted to establish a post office and a branch custom house in the second ward of Buchanan. By that time, the second ward was already widely known as Lower Buchanan.

In 1883, five hundred dollars was appropriated for opening and constructing a road between Harlandsville and Lower Buchanan.

A resolution restoring Joseph Rice of Buchanan, Grand Bassa County, to the rights and privileges of citizenship.

Footnote: Acts of the Liberian Legislature, 1878, pp. 6-7: Acts of the Liberian Legislature, 1883, p. 23; Acts of the Liberian Legislature, 1860, p. 73.