Bod Os: The Board Houses of Freetown

Walk through the older parts of Freetown and you can still find them: houses of wooden boards standing on a ground floor of stone, with a verandah, shuttered windows, a steep roof and often a small garret window in it. In Krio they are bod os, board houses.

The style came with the settlers. The Nova Scotians had lived in North America, and they were building two-storey wooden houses with stone foundations and shingled roofs as early as 1796. The Jamaican Maroons who arrived in 1800 brought their own Caribbean ways of building. The result looks like the houses of the American South and the Caribbean, and nothing like the stone offices the colony built in the same streets.

They were built with timber from the forests around the city on stone quarried nearby. For families whose parents or grandparents had been enslaved, owning a house like this was a mark of freedom.

Many have gone, to age, fire and rebuilding in concrete. The ones that remain are mostly private homes, and most have never been recorded.

If your family owns a board house, or grew up in one, photograph it front and back and tell us who built it and when. It may be the only record there is.