The emigrants named the settlement in honor of Elliott Cresson, a Philadelphia merchant and Pennsylvania Colonization Society founder who funded their voyage to Liberia.

A month later, a new colony called Bassa Cove was founded by black Quakers of the Young Men's Colonization Society of Pennsylvania.

Throughout much of the 1850s, Buchanan's population failed to grow, as deaths outnumbered births and only through immigration from the United States was the community able to avoid a substantial decline.

Stephen Ellis writes that during early 1994, ECOMOG '..Nigerian troops dismantled, and exported as second-hand plant or as scrap metal, industrial equipment worth some $50 million' which had remained intact when the port had earlier been occupied by the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, Charles Taylor's faction.

Buchanan Renewable Energies, a firm based in Toronto, Canada, that processes chips from rubber tree trunks into biofuel, has begun operations in the city.