The Mission Ruins of Venn's Town, also known as Venn's Town Mission Ruins or Mission Lodge, are the remains of a late 19th-century Anglican mission settlement on Mahé Island in the Seychelles.
History The settlement was opened in 1876 and closed in 1889. It was named after Henry Venn, an Anglican missionary who co-founded the Church Mission Society with William Wilberforce. Construction was led by civil chaplain William Bartlett Chancellor after talks with Seychelles civil commissioner Charles Salmon and Mauritius governor Sir Arthur Purves Phayre.
It was set up after the Royal Navy rescued 2,816 slaves from Arab dhows in the Indian Ocean between 1861 and 1874 and brought them to Mahé. The first group of 252 arrived on HMS Lyra (1808) on 14 May 1861. Initially, these freed people and their children were placed on coconut and vanilla estates.
The site included two large dormitories, workshops, kitchens, laborer huts, a storeroom, and a schoolmaster’s cottage. About 50 acres of nearby land grew cocoa, vanilla, and coffee to help pay for the institution’s costs. Venn’s Town started with 37 children, 20 boys and 17 girls. They learned carpentry, gardening, Bible stories, and psalm-singing. Teaching was done in Creole, French, and Kiswahili. Three superintendents ran the site: William Bartlett Chancellor (1876–1880), Henry Morris Warry (1880–1885), and Edwin Lucock from (1885–1889). A small cemetery on the grounds held graves of children who died from dysentery and diphtheria, as well as two daughters of Chancellor and a young son of Lucock. From 1879 most children at the institution were born to African parents who worked on local plantations rather than direct children of newly freed slaves.
Venn’s Town closed in 1889 and the children moved to other African schools.
Marianne North's visit of 1882 Marianne North, an English biologist and botanical artist, known for her plant and landscape paintings, visited Seychelles in 1882 and stayed with a local official’s family. She visited the settlement where she spent three weeks painting the beautiful surroundings. She created four paintings there, which are part of her larger collection now displayed at Kew Gardens in London.
Location The ruins of the settlement are located in the southwest of Morne Seychellois National Park on the "lush hills of Sans Soucis", at an altitude of 450 m, within the Port Glaud district, and were declared a National Monument in 1984. In 2013, it was added to Seychelles' tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage inscription under cultural criteria (iv) and (vi).
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