Free Villages - Pioneering The Concept

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 keep labour costs low or negligible upon abolition of slavery. To circumvent this, the predominantly African-Caribbean Baptist chapels approached Baptist and Quaker contacts in England to instruct land agents in London to buy Jamaican land and hold it for establishment of Free Villages not controlled by the 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 further emboldened him and led to the establishment of a Free Village in Oracabessa later that same year.