'Free Village is the term used for Caribbean settlements, particularly in Jamaica, founded in the 1830s and 1840s with land for freedmen with independence of the control of plantation owners and other major estates.
The concept was initiated by English Baptist missionaries in Jamaica, who raised funds in Great Britain to buy land to be granted to freedmen after emancipation.
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.
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.
In Jamaica, these include: In the Bahamas: Although many of the Free Villages were named after a British man of widely accepted influence or importance, perhaps to help raise funds in England, the Jamaican Baptists and Joseph Sturge were Moral Radicals and Nonconformists rather than in the political mainstream.
Pickering and Tyrell said that naming was "a brave initiative that honoured women in an active, albeit gendered role as reformers at a time when custom frowned on their participation in the public world".