By Barbara Arrindell
The original five parishes of Antigua were formalised in 1692. Before and after that the island was made up of a number of divisions. In the mid to late 1700s these would have included, but not been limited to, the Divisions of Five Islands, Willoughby Bay, Old Road, Rendezvous, North Sound, New North Sound, Belfast, Falmouth, Dickenson Bay and Popeshead.
Popeshead Division was located to the North of the island and at one time a Free Black man named Barry Conyers Hart operated an estate, near to Royals. Some documents did not call it an estate, but a sizeable farm.
Barry inherited and continued to own (until he left Antigua for Trinidad in 1800), a number of enslaved people. Some worked on his property while others were rented out, particularly to work in St John’s.
His father was a white Irish man, John Hart, who served as Governor of Maryland between 1714 and 1720 before becoming Captain General of the Leward Islands from 1721 to 1727. His mother was said to be an enslaved Black woman named Elizabeth Hillhouse. This would mean that Barry had technically been born a slave and would have been manumitted at some point, presumably by his father who fully acknowledged him as his natural child and educated him.
Barry’s first wife was Ann Clearkley. She was a free Black woman and her white father, Timothy Clearkley, had property in Antigua and St Kitts. Clearkley somehow managed to marry Frances the enslaved Black mother of his four children, and they rose in rank in the early Methodist Church in Antigua. Methodisthistory.org has this to say about Frances: “She became a ‘true Christian’ through the ministry of Francis Gilbert from whom she received her first membership ticket pinned to the Rules of the Methodist Society.”
When it was time for Barry and Ann to wed, a special licence was granted for the marriage of a free mixed-race couple and Barry and Ann were joined in holy matrimony on August 30, 1766 in the Anglican parish church of St John. They had six children and these children were considered to be second generation free Blacks.
The family would have been part of the 4,000 free black people on island, but also members of an even smaller, privileged class of land owning and slaveholding, well-educated Black people. In 1776 there were approximately 30,000+ enslaved people in Antigua and its two dependents Barbuda and Redonda.
Among Barry and Ann’s six free born children were Anne and Elizabeth, now remembered for their work in establishing a school in the building that Vigo of Blake’s Estate constructed which they would eventually call Bethesda.
Barry’s first six children were educated at home, in the Popeshead District, by Ann’s sister, Lydia, described by the Methodists of the day as pious and intelligent. The children were young when their mother died on November 20th, 1780. Anne and Elizabeth were not yet teenagers. Their father remarried and had eight more children. Anne and Elizabeth took responsibility for the education of all of their younger siblings and their home school also offered education to the enslaved children who were owned by their family.
Their father, described as a meliorationist and not an abolishonist, would have encouraged this as the suggestion is that he was a kind Master who did what he could to improve the lives of those he owned including helping with the paperwork needed when an individual could afford to purchase his/her own freedom.
So, we know that Barry Hart was a landowner, a kinder than most slaveowner and the father of 14. He is said to have been as comfortable in the company of fellow planters (white) as he was with free Blacks and enslaved people. He also had time to write opinion pieces in the local newspaper and submitted his poetry for publication in the Poet’s Corner.
Barry inherited land and enslaved people from family and associates and had the equivalent of a small trust fund, receiving £200 when he turned 21 and £50 per year for a number of years after.
One of the reasons we can still find such great details about Barry’s life is that he became a devout Methodist. In the early years of the church, services and meetings were held at his home.
In 1783 when Reverend Baxter was trying to find a way to establish a permanent church in St John’s he wrote that he was unable to get any significant assistance from the white Methodist population but it was Barry who turned over his property at Tanner Street having received only a deposit and a promise to pay, allowing Methodism to grow and flourish in St John’s.
Barry purchased the lot from a Negro mariner, John Nanton, a year before on December 9th 1782 for £360. It was a corner lot on Tanner and Temple Streets and was approximately 70×70 feet. Somehow, in that small space they built a chapel that could seat 2,000 worshipers. This wooden building was the first Methodist chapel to be built in the West Indies and was used until 1839 when they moved into the site on St Mary’s street, worshiping comfortably in their superior stone structure for four years when the great earthquake of 1843 caused severe damaging. Most of the visible part of the building had to be demolished and worship was held elsewhere and then in the schoolroom below, until Ebenezer was restored.
By 1800, Barry Hart’s financial situation had taken a turn for the worse and he jumped at an opportunity that arose in Trinidad. He spent a few years there and then came home. His exact date of birth is not clear, but he was believed to be around the same age as his half-brother Gratianus who had been baptised on September 2nd, 1747. Gratianus was the only known child born to John Hart’s first wife. John had a second wife, but they seemed not to have had children.
Barry Conyers Harts, a Black landowner, planter, slave-holder, humanitarian, philanthropist, devout Methodist, involved father, writer, and social activist, died and was buried on December 2, 1808. He was believed to be around 60 years old.
