These were the Liberated Africans - people captured for the transatlantic slave trade whose ships were stopped by the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron after Britain banned the trade. Pulled from the holds of slavers off the West African coast, they were brought to Freetown and resettled in villages carved into the surrounding hills. Regent was one of the first. The people who landed here came from dozens of nations and spoke dozens of languages; many had been torn from homes they would never see again. What they built together - alongside Jamaican Maroons and Black settlers from Nova Scotia - became the foundation of the Sierra Leone Creole people, a wholly new society assembled by the survivors of an atrocity. The town's English name honored George IV, then Prince Regent, but the town itself belonged to them.

At the center of that new community rose St Charles' Church, its foundation stone laid in 1809 and the building completed in 1816 when the German-born missionary William A. B. Johnson of the Church Missionary Society arrived. It is widely held to be the first stone church built in West Africa, raised by liberated Africans on a hilltop that had been wilderness a few years before. Johnson, who served here from 1816 until his death in 1823, drew crowds so large the church had to be enlarged - though the deeper story is the congregation itself, people who had every reason to despair choosing instead to build, learn, and worship in a language and a faith many were encountering for the first time. The stone walls still stand, weathered but solid, a monument less to one missionary than to the thousands who laid them.

Two centuries on, Regent is a mountainous town of roughly 22,000 people, and its religious diversity - churches and mosques sharing the same steep streets - reflects the patchwork of origins that founded it. It produced figures like the economist and politician Solomon Athanasius James Pratt, whose career carried the town's name into national life. The setting is dramatic: houses cling to slopes thick with forest, the air cooler than the city below, the Atlantic glittering in the distance beyond ridge after green ridge. It is a quiet place now, more village than suburb, but every stone in it sits on a story of people who were never meant to be free and built a home anyway.

The same hills that shelter Regent can turn against it. In August 2017, after relentless rain, a portion of Mount Sugar Loaf above the Regent area collapsed in a catastrophic mudslide and flood that killed an estimated 500 people, many in their sleep, with hundreds more never recovered. Floodwaters carried the dead toward the Atlantic, and some were found as far away as the coast near Conakry, in neighboring Guinea. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in the country's modern history, and it struck a community already defined by endurance. Regent grieved, buried its dead where it could, and stayed. The town that began with survivors of one tragedy has, more than two centuries later, survived another.