Reading this week:

• *On to Kilimanjaro *by Brian Gardner

This is the story of me trying to find Heddle’s Farm. Why did I go looking for it? Because it is there. Maybe.

Early on in our Sierra Leone journey I of course discovered the list of national monuments. In Zambia, it was a book about various national monuments published by their National Monuments Commission that had me out looking at a lot of stuff and then trying to document it on the internet so it was more accessible to other people. I wanted to recreate that here in Sierra Leone because it is fun. These sorts of things have just the right amount of mystery. The places are usually documented enough that you can find them but not documented enough where it’s easy. I should point out that this is about documentation. Someone knows where all these things are; they are written down in government archives somewhere or someone is in charge of going and looking at the things every so often. That someone probably works for the Sierra Leone Monuments and Relics Commission and I really need to get down there and talk to them but I usually have to work when they are open and I just haven’t made it yet. So when I am looking for things there are easier answers but the handicap makes it fun. This brings me to Heddle’s Farm.

Right away I wanted to go look at Heddle’s Farm. Probably what intrigued me the most was that, according to the Sierra Leone Heritage page I just linked to, it eventually became part of the botanical garden of Fourah Bay College. I like botanical gardens so once you find out one exists, you like gotta go. And maybe they sell saplings that I could plant. It also meant I thought it would make it easy to find Heddle’s Farm, I mean, I know where Fourah Bay College is and it’s easy to drive to and botanical gardens are large and easy to spot. Not so. I dragged my super amazing wife out one weekend to drive around the college (through and then back through again that is) to see if we could spot the garden. We couldn’t. Later that week I had her ask some local colleagues about it and they were vaguely aware a botanical garden existed but were not really sure where it would be. So that was a bit of a dead end.

Back on the Sierra Leone Heritage page it recommends that for further reading you turn to A Residence at Sierra Leone. So I did. I bought the book in hardcopy and had it shipped here and read the whole thing for clues to the location of Heddle’s Farm. The book itself is what it says on the cover, a series of letters and journal entries edited together into a day-by-day narrative of the author’s time living in Sierra Leone. During most of the time she stayed in the house that later became known as Heddle’s Farm, after Charles Heddle, who owned it for a while and was very successful. Not to detract from Charles Heddle, who has a significant amount of stuff written about him online, but after reading A Residence in Sierra Leone I wanted to know more about the author. Her name was Elizabeth Melville. She originally published her book as “By a Lady” (edited by the Hon. Mrs. Norton), I assume to avoid anyone featured in the book thinking she was gossiping about them. But googling around I can’t really find anything much about her, though like so many things in Sierra Leone clearly someone knows a significant amount about her, I just don’t know who and I don’t know where they wrote it down. So in an attempt to be helpful to future googlers, I present, based on everything I could find online about her,

A Biography of Elizabeth Melville:

Elizabeth Helen Callender Melville was born in Dunipace, Scotland, on March 14, 1818. In 1840 she moved with her husband and baby to Sierra Leone. Her husband was a judge on the Mixed Commission Court which examined whether seized ships had been part of the slave trade. The family had at least one furlough in England but returned there permanently in 1846. She published her book in 1849.

…and that’s it. Elucidating. Anyways out of reading the book there were a couple of clues. One is that she describes the house as being “at the formidable distance of half an hour’s ride” from Freetown, which I figured put it about a mile from what is now downtown. Another is that she describes looking over at Mount Aureol from the house (she spells it “Oriel”). She says “The hill to our right rises up very abruptly, shutting out the view of both river and opposite shore. It is much higher and still more difficult of access than this; although were a plank (could we find one long enough) flung across from our windows to the corresponding height on the other side, I think I could run across in five minutes.” From that clue her house is not on Mount Aureol, but next to it. When I looked at Google Maps for where Mount Aureol was, it showed me what I interpreted to be the area next to Fourah Bay College (at this point where I still thought a botanical garden was), so I wrongly took this as evidence the house was somewhere on the grounds of college. But since I already had been thwarted looking for a botanical garden on the grounds of the college, I searched for other sources.

One interesting thing I found was the above picture, via the Library of Congress. I figured there could only be so many botanical gardens in Freetown, so that house pictured might be Heddle House itself. I was further encouraged when I noticed the house in the photo looks a lot like the house in the painting that graces the Sierra Leone Heritage webpage. I also, upon re-reading that webpage, noted that Heddle’s Farm is described as being “on the old Leicester Road.” I managed to figure out that the old Leicester Road is the that the Leicester Police Post sits on. I had also come across this Government of Sierra Leone Integrated GIS Portal, and you’ll have to do the zooming yourself but if you zoom in along that road there is a section labelled “Tree Planting” and ah ha! I thought. Botanical garden, trees, tree planting, Old Leicester Road, maybe I have found it, and with a picture of the location and of the house itself in hand maybe I could go find it. So I went out for another drive to hunt the place down, assured of success!

I was unsuccessful. I could discern no tree planting along the road, except for a sign that said “tree planting.” There were no old buildings or anything that looked botanical garden-like, and as I went down the road it got dicier and dicier to the point where I cut my losses and turned around, defeated.

Once I returned home, I puttered around and realized that although my idea of looking at a map for the location of Leicester Road was pretty brilliant, it was not brilliant enough. Between being the home of Elizabeth Melville and the current day, Heddle House spent some time as the home of the Forest Commissioner. I figured the Forest Commissioner’s house, being a government facility, would be on old maps, and I had already found some old maps of Freetown. Specifically, I had found a 1947 map of Freetown from here. Looking down at the area around Fourah Bay College, I discovered two things: one, that Mount Aureol is the hill that Fourah Bay College is located on, and two, a little marker labelled “Heddle’s.” Well! That settled it! This was the location of Heddle House, on the hill next to Fourah Bay College. For your handy reference, I think it is where this marker is on Google Maps. Now all I had to do was go look at it.

This was not as easy as I thought it would be. I knew from my Leicester Road experience that the driving in that area was not so fun, so what I really wanted to do was park at Fourah Bay College and walk over. Mrs. Melville describes riding up Mount Aureol from Heddle House, and I wanted to essentially do the opposite. I made the mistake of picking a Sunday for this adventure and found a rather large church gathering at Fourah Bay College that I was too embarrassed to try to sneak around so I could muck off into the woods. So I drove down the hill and drove back up the adjoining hill, where I thought Heddle House lay. This was encouraging, actually, because I found a stretch of road that seemed to have once been paved, perhaps in the colonial era, like you would presumably do so the forest commissioner can get up to his house. Eventually though I could go no further without (I felt) significant risk of the car tumbling over the side of the cliff, so I parked in front of a shop after asking the proprietor if it was okay. She was very friendly.

View of Fourah Bay College from what I think is the location of Heddle’s Farm.

From my parking spot it was still a bit of a hike up the hill and the most impressive part of the whole adventure is that there are very nice houses up there built with what look like very heavy building materials and I am stunned someone hiked all that concrete and building materials up there. A very nice view though! The picture at the very top of this post is from near the shop I parked at and was pretty encouraging that this was the spot. The tallest building in the right third of the photo is the Freetown City Council building, right smack in the middle of downtown and the oldest part of the city. At one point in her book Mrs. Melville describes being able to see Freetown from her window as if laid out in miniature, and yeah that is exactly what I saw from that vantage point.

What I had hoped to find at the top of the hill was some sort of historical marker. There are historical markers next to some of the other historical sites I have seen in Sierra Leone, so I was hoping that along one of the paths up there I would find one and it would confirm I was in the right spot. I never did. I was also hoping to find the remains of the house, and I didn’t find those either. For quite a number of years the house had been reduced to just its foundations, and I think even those are gone these days. If you look at the Google Maps link from before, in the area there is a large dirt patch which currently serves as a soccer field and a source of clay for bricks. Nearby is a trash pile and all around the area are homes that have sprung up on the hill as Freetown expands. There is also a communications tower on top of the hill. Various friendly people saw me wandering around and asked what I was up to. I showed them pictures of other historical markers and asked if they knew of something similar up there, to no avail. Some suggested I look over at the college and I went down that path a little ways but didn’t see anything. I also poked around the hill but the only historic-looking thing I found was a geographical survey marker:

Eventually I decided I wasn’t going to see any artifacts that confirmed this was the location of Heddle House but I walked away satisfied anyway. The area clearly matches the description, given the saddle-like nature of the hill, the view of Mount Aureol, and the stunning vista of Freetown laid out in miniature. It’s a beautiful spot and despite the fact I have no idea how people get building materials up there, as a living location it is certainly charming. I don’t think there are any remnants of the botanical garden left, which is a bit sad, but there are other things for Freetown and Fourah Bay College to devote their resources to. The people on top of the hill were very friendly and tried to help. If you’re ever in the area it is probably much more straightforward to go to Fourah Bay College or Leicester Mountain for the views, but if you do get up there they are very nice.

One final note while I’m talking about A Residence in Sierra Leone. At one point in the book Mrs. Melville is relating the story of the 1794 French attack on Freetown, as told to her by various eyewitnesses. Melville is recording this in a letter she wrote in 1846, a half century after the event. Relating the story, she describes how the French “scoured the town in search of stock, which they kept shooting at… books, plants, seeds, dried birds and insects, were torn, trampled upon, and scattered about; telescopes, barometers, thermometers, and an electrical machine shared the same fate…” A mystery (to me anyway) is what the heck she was referring to when she said “an electrical machine?” I mentioned the whole half century thing because the eyewitnesses must have been relatively young when they witnessed the attack, their memory could have been influenced by subsequent events, and Mrs. Melville might have interpreted something they said anachronistically. But with all that being said what 1790s “electrical machine” is existing in a colony that hadn’t been around for a decade at this point? What is this thing she’s referring to? Electrical thingies existed at this point and were popular (Ben Franklin flew his kite in 1752), but what would have been in the colony? It’s listed with weather-related equipment so maybe something to do with that? Or just a scientific novelty? If you know what they are talking about please let me know.