X-Nico

Free Villages

Trysee (the name is believed to derive from 'try and see'), an early Free Village in the Brown's Town area.

•

In 2007, a plaque was erected at Witter Park, Sligoville on May 23, as a Labour Day event - to commemorate 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 scheme to come to fruition at Sligoville (in Saint Catherine parish and named after the Marquess of Sligo, the Jamaican Governor at the time of abolition), ten miles north of Spanish Town.

Man in the Hills

In Jamaican history, the roots of radical protest, a national identity and the Rastafari movement, grew from communities formed by escaped slaves in the hills and (after emancipation in 1838) the so-called "Free Villages".

see also