All About Us

City Corporation of Arthington, Montserrado County, Liberia-Telephone Number – 231-886-513 – 534

Here is Our

Vision

To build a new Arthington encapsulating all modern-day requirements for a modern-day Day City.

Mission

In Unity, to rebrand the City of Arthington as a captivating and enterprising City to attract more tangible and mutually inclusive developments, thus emerging as a beautiful place to be.

Focus

  1. Focus: – Roads, Agriculture, Health, Education, Tourism, Business
  2. Committees: – agriculture, Health, Education, Tourism, Business
  3. See Organogram

Short History About US

The founders of Arthington went over in four main groups, from Bertie County, North Carolina, York County, South Carolina, and Lowndes County, Georgia. They made this enormous leap of faith, to leave their lives in their native land and start new ones in what to many of them was a strange land, for many reasons. One reason was the long-held desire on the part of some enslaved Africans in the Americas, to “return” to “our father country,” as ALONZO HOGGARD described their new home in a letter to friends and sponsors in the States after their arrival. But another reason was the growing backlash against Reconstruction in the south, as the Klan emerged and racial oppression intensified.

One group from South Carolina included at least one state senator, chased out of office and out of the state, by the terrorist night riders. Your ancestors, the Hoggards, Askies, Tylers, etc., were the first group, arriving in Liberia in December 1869, and led by ALONZO HOGGARD, SOLOMON YORK, and RICHARD RAYNER. The second group, from York County, South Carolina, arrived the following year, led by JOHN ROULHAC. In 1871, parties from York County, SC, and Lowndes County, GA. Led by JEFFERSON BRACEWELL and ELIAS HILL arrived, and in 1872 another group from Lowndes County, GA. Led by AARON MILLER, went over.

Liberia was 47 years old then, and had been an independent country for 22 years, beginning in 1847. Monrovia was the capital and center of trade, but the newcomers chose not to stay there but to join the agricultural communities up the St. Paul River. In this, they followed the tradition of earlier agrarian immigrants from Virginia and Kentucky who established the towns of Clay and Ashland in the 1840s and Virginia in 1825. In his first letter back home from Monrovia, Alonzo Hoggard wrote that everybody was fine and happy, but that they would be even happier once they got upriver.

This land, which JEHUDI ASHMUN described as the “finest farming lands in the world,” was purchased from the Dei people in 1825. There, they established the first agricultural settlement, first named St. Paul, and renamed it Caldwell, in honor of ACS Secretary Elias B. Caldwell. In 1828, Millsburg was founded, right in the middle of Dei-Gola country, and near the important town of Bopolu, gateway into the interior. We must note here that Solomon Hill was one of those immigrants fortunate enough to know the ethnicity of his African ancestors. His mother came from the Gola people.

In March, 1870, while the women and children stayed in Monrovia, the men went up the river and began clearing the land for building their houses, and for farming. Each immigrant family was allotted ten acres of land. Additional land for cash crops could be obtained from the government.

According to historian Dr. Patrick Burrowes, the site chosen for Arthington was previously impenetrable rainforest in hilly, uneven terrain, six miles from the nearest settlement, Millsburg. EDWARD WILMOT BLYDEN wrote that “the only sounds to be heard were of the birds in the tops of the lofty trees, and there was no opening in the dense forest and undergrowth but the narrow foot path traveled for generations.”

They faced many hardships, including deadly tropical diseases, problems with the rich but unfamiliar tropical soil and climate, lack of capital for mechanized farming, problems acquiring labor, and attacks from hostile interior people. The Dei people, formerly close allies of the Gola, were at this point being decimated by elements of the Gola. The Dei people naturally sought refuge in Arthington and Millsburg, which led to war with the Gola when the Liberians protected the Dei people from certain enslavement or death. In one instance, the Gola warlord Gatumba came after some Dei people being sheltered at the farm of the Harris brothers, Owen and Zion. Zion Harris and three of his Dei workers held off Gatumba’s warriors until the militia arrived from Monrovia. Men like the Harris brothers heroically volunteered to fight slave traders at Cape Mount and Grand Bassa, and can be largely credited with eradicating the slave trade on that part of the West African coast, a remarkable achievement for which Liberia has never been given credit.

SOURCES

African Repository, 1870, 1871

  1. Patrick Burrowes, ARTHINGTON, A STORY OF SELF-RELIANCE AND RESILIENCE http://historicliberia.org/project/arthington/…

William Ezra Allen, PhD, COFFEE AND SUGAR: A HISTORY OF SETTLER AGRICULTURE IN 19TH

Like most of the formerly enslaved repatriates, many immigrants were dirt poor, and relied on the six months rations from the ACS to sustain themselves and their families. Dirt poor they may have been, but as the Liberian NEW ERA newspaper described them, they were also “intelligent, active, industrious and enterprising.” Within three years, Alonzo Hoggard, aided only by his four young sons, had cultivated five thousand coffee trees, four acres of rice and three and a half acres of potatoes, cassava, eddoes and many garden vegetables.  Solomon York had three thousand coffee trees, many already bearing fruit, as well as rice, cassava and other crops, and Richard Rayner was also growing coffee, sugarcane and ginger, while his wife produced barrels of Indian corn for sale. The Hill and Moore trading company, run by Solomon Hill and June Moore, became a major firm in Liberia and allowed the pair to endow the nearby Baptist vocational institute at Suehn. Jefferson Bracewell, with the aid of his seven sons, cleared and planted thirty acres in one year.

A visitor in 1873 noted, he had “1,100 coffee trees, made his large crops of rice, potatoes, and eddoes, so as to supply his own family; imported a sugar-mill, and made his own sugar and syrup last season. He has made a large coffee nursery, and is now tanning some of the best leather used in this country.” Bracewell had been so perpetually busy, a reporter for the New Era newspaper joked, he had no time to get sick. “His wife and daughter spin and weave all the cloth that he and those boys wear, and he has built with his own hands his own dwelling house, outside store-house, weaving and loom house for his wife, and a house for tanning.”  With other farmers and planters flourishing in the neighboring towns of Clay Ashland, Virginia, and Millsburg, the St. Paul River area was the center of the coffee and sugarcane industry, and a growing political force as more towns were added. Garett Cooper and Sons, Jacob Richardson, William Spencer Anderson and Jesse Sharp all built and operated steam mills and large, very profitable sugar mills, producing tons of sugar for local trade and export.

At the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, Liberian soap and coffee was on display, and at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, soap and coffee products were complemented by other Liberian exports and products of industry and invention, including a loom created by Martha Ann Erskine Ricks, famous for her quilt made for Queen Victoria. She made the fabric for the quilt on the loom she created herself. The Ricks family were hugely successful coffee farmers who donated the land and funding for the creation of Ricks Institute, the oldest vocational school in the country, as they were passionate about self-reliance, constantly admonishing Liberians to eschew government jobs for agriculture and industry.  The year the Hoggards arrived, 1869 saw a political upheaval resulting in a change of government. The Republican Party, dominated by the wealthy merchant princes of Monrovia, was defeated by the True Whig Party, which drew its support mainly from upriver. The colorism and caste divide, real or perceived and present in diasporan African communities everywhere, became an issue, as the Republican Party was seen as dominated by biracial, free-born, upper-class people, mostly from the state of Virginia. 

The elections were turbulent, violent, deadly and brought the young country to the brink of civil war; one year after the new True Whig Party president, EJ ROYE took office, he was deposed by a mob, backed by Republican officials.  William Spencer Anderson was Speaker of the House under EJ Roye. He and other True Whig Party leaders were arrested, detained, and some prosecuted. This tragedy however had a positive outcome, the eventual unofficial merger of the Republican and True Whig Parties into one, which averted civil war and seems to have reduced the colorism-caste issue to insignificance. The St. Paul River district remained a political powerhouse, even as power gradually shifted to the southeast in the 1920s.

The names Tyler, Askie, Bracewell, Hill, Anderson, Moore, and those of other families on the 1869-1872 ships can be found prominent among the officials and leading citizens of the St. Paul River settlements, from township commissioners and True Whig Party officials to senators and representatives, and Masonic, civic, military, government and business leaders.