Thomas Birch Freeman (6 December 1809 in Twyford, Hampshire – 12 August 1890 in Accra) was an Anglo-African Wesleyan minister, missionary, botanist and colonial official in West Africa. He is widely regarded as a pioneer of the Methodist Church in colonial West Africa, where he also established multiple schools. Some scholars view him as the "Founder of Ghana Methodism". Freeman's missionary activities took him to Dahomey, now Benin as well as to Western Nigeria.
Biographical synopsis
Born in Twyford, Hampshire, Thomas Birch Freeman was the son of an African father, Thomas Freeman, and an English mother, Amy Birch. He worked as a gardener and botanist for Sir Robert Harland (1765–1848) at Orwell Park near Ipswich until dismissed for abandoning Anglicanism for Wesleyan Methodism. Under Freeman, nine schools were established in the colony of Gold Coast (present day Ghana) in 1841, three of which were for girls. He continued opening schools, and by 1880 had about 83 schools with roughly 3,000 students. In 1838, he went as a Methodist missionary to West Africa, founding Methodist churches in the Gold Coast in Cape Coast and Accra, and establishing a mission station in Kumasi. In 1850, Freeman established agriculture farms at Buela near Cape Coast (all in present-day Ghana). He also went to towns in southern Nigeria and to the kingdom of Dahomey. In 1843, while on furlough in Britain, he was active in the anti-slavery cause. After resigning as a missionary in 1857, he was employed by the colonial government as civil commandant of Accra district from 1857 to 1873.
Freeman married three times. His first two wives, who were white British women, died soon after they arrived in West Africa, and he subsequently married a local Fante woman. In 1873, he rejoined the Mission, and together with his son, promoted Methodist work in the southern Gold Coast.
Early life
Thomas Birch Freeman was born on 6 December 1809 in Twyford, about three miles from Winchester, Hampshire, England. In those days, Winchester was a bastion of Wesleyan Methodism. His father, a gardener named Thomas was an African freedman from the West Indies, who obtained his freedom under the Emancipation Act, and was brought to England by his master, a slave-owning aristocrat. T. B. Freeman's mother, Amy Birch was a working-class Englishwoman. Amy Birch was a housemaid in the home of Freeman's father's master. Amy Birch had previously been married to John Birch, with whom she had three children. When Thomas Birch Freeman was six years old, his father died. He lived with his mother in "a middle-class house facing a three-cornered space, a public house, "The Dolphin", occupying the second, and a [thatched] cottage, then used as the Wesleyan preaching-house, the third corner of the triangle" in Twyford where it is presumed he received a solid education, although there is no historical record of the institutions he formally enrolled in. During his childhood, he and his friends used to play pranks on a local cobbler who eventually introduced Freeman to Methodism. This shoemaker lived in the Wesleyan preaching house and was a Methodist class-leader and a lay preacher of his village. Freeman followed the footsteps of his late father and became a gardener on a Suffolk estate where he developed an interest in botany. T. B. Freeman became a botanist and head gardener to Sir Robert Harland at Orwell Park on the banks of the Orwell, near Ipswich in Suffolk. Freeman was an avid reader and became knowledgable in horticulture and listing plants Latin botanical names. Freeman kept a small library in his rooms. Decades later when he relocated to the Gold Coast, Thomas Freeman exchanged correspondence with Sir William Hooker (1785–1865), the first Director of Kew Gardens near London, the world’s leading botanical institution, on West African flora. Freeman also researched and collated scientific data on tropical fauna for Kew Gardens.
