The old town of Harper preserves — or rather shows the ruins of — a distinctive architectural tradition brought by the Americo-Liberian settlers who came from the American South in the nineteenth century. The houses, churches, and public buildings were built in a style that echoed plantation architecture, creating neighbourhoods that once looked more like coastal Georgia than West Africa. The civil wars of the 1990s destroyed much of this fabric, and rebuilding has been slow.
What remains is a landscape of crumbling grandeur: former mansions with wide porches and wooden upper floors in various states of collapse, the shells of public buildings, and the occasional well-preserved structure still in use. The Masonic Lodge hall, with its distinctive golden orb visible from the sea, is one of the more striking survivors. Walking the streets of old Harper gives a vivid sense of the particular Americo-Liberian world that was built here and largely lost.