Long before the American Colonization Society drew its maps, the Dei people held Bushrod Island. They occupied the low-lying mangrove swampland from the sixteenth century onward, building their chief settlement at Gawulun, which served as the capital of the Dei confederation. In 1819, a leader known as King Peter, whose Dei name was Zolu Duma, was selected as chief spokesman for the island's Dei chiefs. The Dei were among the indigenous groups who watched the arrival of the ACS-sponsored settlers with a mixture of commerce and caution, their own political structures already well established on land that the newcomers would eventually claim and rename. The encounter between the Dei and the settlers was not a simple displacement but a long, uneven negotiation whose terms kept shifting as the colony of Liberia took shape around them.

In the late 1820s, a community called New Georgia appeared on Bushrod Island. Its founders were people who had been rescued from a slave ship in 1820, then held in the U.S. state of Georgia for seven years before being sent to Liberia. The name they chose honored the American state that had sheltered them, even as they crossed an ocean to build something new. By 1878, New Georgia had grown to about five hundred residents, coexisting on the island with a community of Vai people whose settlement, known as Vai Town, sat across the Mesurado River from Monrovia proper. The arrangement was a small-scale model of Liberia's larger complexity: indigenous groups, formerly enslaved Americans, and people freed from slave ships all occupying the same territory, each with different claims to belonging.

Today, Bushrod Island's defining feature is the Freeport of Monrovia, Liberia's principal deepwater port and the commercial artery through which most of the country's imports and exports flow. The port shares the island with four distinct towns: Vai Town, New Kru Town, Logan Town, and Clara Town, each with its own character and history. Residential neighborhoods crowd against government buildings and small businesses. End Point, a geographical feature at the island's northern tip, marks where the Saint Paul River widens toward the sea. The proximity to Monrovia's city center, connected by bridges across the Mesurado River and Stockton Creek, makes Bushrod Island an extension of the capital rather than a separate entity. Much of the island sits barely above sea level, and the tidal influence of Stockton Creek, which links the Saint Paul and Mesurado rivers, keeps the boundary between land and water perpetually negotiable.

Bushrod Washington never traveled to Liberia. He served as a U.S. Supreme Court justice and managed Mount Vernon after his uncle's death, but his most consequential legacy may be the organization he led. The American Colonization Society operated from a tangle of motivations: some members genuinely sought to offer formerly enslaved people a path to self-governance, while others wanted to remove free Black Americans from a society that refused to grant them equality. Liberia itself was the result, a nation whose capital, Monrovia, is named for another ACS-affiliated president, James Monroe. The island that bears Bushrod Washington's name sits at the literal foundation of that project. Its mangrove roots hold the sediment in place while the rivers shift around them, a geography that mirrors the island's history: layered, contested, and stubbornly present.