The name comes from the Asante word Acheampong, linking this Jamaican hilltop to the Akan people of present-day Ghana. Accompong was reportedly the brother of Cudjoe, the legendary Maroon leader who united formerly enslaved and Indigenous Taino people into a guerrilla force that fought the British to a standstill during the First Maroon War. In the rugged karst landscape of Cockpit Country, with its sinkholes and razor-edged limestone towers, the Maroons held an advantage no conventional army could overcome. The terrain itself was a weapon. In 1739, under the Kindah Tree, an ancient mango tree that still stood as recently as 2009, Cudjoe and the British signed a treaty under Governor Edward Trelawny. The agreement granted the Maroons 1,500 acres of land, political autonomy, and economic freedoms. Cudjoe governed Trelawny Town, and Accompong governed the settlement that bears his name.

Autonomy came with conditions that stained the Maroons' own history. In exchange for self-governance and military alliance with the British, the Maroons agreed to return enslaved people who had escaped the plantations, collecting a bounty of two dollars per person. This clause tore a fault line between the Maroons and the broader enslaved population of Jamaica. Some refugees from the sugar estates still found their way to Maroon settlements and were sometimes allowed to stay, but the Accompong Maroons also hunted runaways on behalf of neighboring planters. Freedom, in this arrangement, was not universal. It was negotiated, bounded, and complicit in the system it had resisted. The tension between the Maroons' hard-won liberty and their role in enforcing someone else's bondage is one of the most uncomfortable truths in Jamaican history.

When Cudjoe died in 1764, Accompong tried to claim control of both towns, as the 1739 treaty had named him Cudjoe's successor. The governor intervened, stripping Accompong of the Trelawny Town badge of authority and handing it to a local officer named Lewis. Accompong was told his jurisdiction ended at his own town's borders. He died sometime in the following decade, and control of the Leeward Maroon towns passed to white superintendents appointed by the colonial government.

When the Second Maroon War erupted in 1795, Accompong Town sided with the British against the Maroons of Trelawny Town. The decision was pragmatic and costly. Captain Chambers, sent to negotiate Trelawny Town's surrender, was shot and beheaded by Captain James Palmer. Colonel William Fitch, ignoring his Maroon trackers' warnings, led his forces into an ambush that killed him along with many militia members and Accompong warriors. Trelawny Town's Maroons were eventually deported to Nova Scotia. Accompong had backed the winning side, but the victory was soaked in Maroon blood.

The village grew steadily: 85 people in 1740, 159 in 1788, 238 by 1808, and 436 by 1841. After emancipation ended slavery across the British Empire in the 1830s, the bounty-hunting clause became moot, but the Maroons' distinct identity persisted. The Accompong Maroons helped the colonial militia suppress the Baptist War of 1831-1832, led by the enslaved preacher Samuel Sharpe, further entangling their history with the contradictions of colonial power. They broke up the runaway settlement called the Congo Settlement in Cockpit Country and clashed with the community of Me-no-Sen-You-no-Come, another group of freedom-seekers who had built a village deeper in the cockpits. Each encounter forced the same question: whose freedom counted, and at whose expense?

Today, Accompong governs itself through a system rooted in Akan traditions brought from West Africa centuries ago. The executive leader holds the title Colonel-in-Chief and leads the Maroon Council. Richard Currie was elected to the position in February 2021. Since Jamaica's independence in 1962, the government has recognized Maroon political and cultural rights, and in the 21st century has acknowledged these in terms of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, including the right to self-governance in local affairs. Every January 6, descendants and friends gather to celebrate Cudjoe's birthday and the treaty that made their autonomy possible. In 2007, the festival became a stage for environmental protest, as attendees pushed back against bauxite mining threatening the Cockpit Country landscape that once sheltered their ancestors from armies. The terrain that made the Maroons unconquerable is still, in a different way, worth fighting for.