In Crozierville, our team is exploring the material world underlying the migration and settlement of some of the approximately fifty large Barbadian families (346 individuals) to Liberia in 1865. The Afro-Barbadians pursued transatlantic migration to Liberia as a response to landless Emancipation, the British Empire, and racial subjectivity. As they transitioned from British subjects into settled Liberian citizens alongside other groups - African Americans, native ethnic Liberians, and liberated Africans - the social, economic, and political changes in their lives and their political ascendancy in Liberia at the turn of the twentieth century were marked in very specific and material ways that manifested on the Crozierville landscape.

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Our ongoing work investigates the homes settlers built, their household possessions, and the how they lived their everyday lives.