Little Liberia Maps

The maps in this gallery indicate how human beings changed local geography over time, adding structures and land where Little Liberia came to be. Over time, water features were removed. Bridgeport Harbor, once within a few hundred feet of Little Liberia’s Freeman Houses, is now more than a quarter mile to the east due to landfill operations that accompanied industrialization and the dissipation of Little Liberia.
Little Liberia, settled in the South End of Bridgeport on the Long Island Sound, an important estuary, once looked much like this.
(John Wright, Freeman Collection)

 

Now the landscape looks like this.
(Google Earth)

 

1775 - 1782, Pre-Revolutionary War Era Map of the Connecticut Coast 1777, Skinner Revolutionary War era map of the Connecticut Coast 1848, Little Liberia http://www.cthistoryonline.org/cdm-cho/item_viewer (2009) 1850, Map of the City of Bridgeport, Conn. Philadelphia, Collins & Clark 1850 Detail 1, Little Liberia, South End of Bridgeport, Collins & Clark 1850 Detail 2, Little Liberia, Close up, Collins & Clark 1850 Detail 3, Little Liberia, North & South African Churches, Gregory St., Collins & Clark 1856, Clark’s Map of Fairfield County, Connecticut, Chace, J.W. J Barker, and N Hector 1856 Detail, Clark’s Map 1867, Little Liberia, http://www.cthistoryonline.org/cdm-cho/item_viewer (2009) 1875, View of Bridgeport, Ct, O.H. Bailey & Co, and American Oleograph Co. 1889, Little Liberia http://www.cthistoryonline.org/cdm-cho/item_viewer (2009)