Richard Brew
Builds the two-storey mansion, the right-hand part of today's compound. Home, trading base and holding place for captives until his death in 1776.
Header Photo - at Richter Fort Osu, Accra
Ghana-Net.com · Central Region · Anomabu (Anomabo)
Ghana's heritage authority lists a "Little Fort" at Anomabu and describes it in one sentence. When we asked, even its own guides at Fort William could not say where it was. It turns out to be standing fifty yards from them: Castle Brew, the fortified mansion of an Irish slave trader, known in Fante as aban kakraba, the little fort. This is its story.
On 26 September 2026 this page carried a different title: a protected ruin nobody can find. The Ghana Museums and Monuments Board lists "The Little Fort at Anomabu" and says of it only that it "is preserved as a ruin". No date, no builder, no location. At Fort William, the Board's guides could not tell us where it was. Our best guess at the time, the Dutch lodge of 1640, was wrong.
The answer came from a lead on the ground, and it holds up in the published research. The art historian Dr Courtnay Micots of Florida A&M University, who has studied the building for years, writes that Richard Brew "called his two-story home 'Castle Brew,' but it was also known as aban kakraba (Little Fort)."
The Little Fort is not lost. It stands about fifty yards from the north-western corner of Fort William, a two-storey Georgian house with later wings. The "ruin nobody can find" was in plain sight all along. What was missing was not the building, but the Board's knowledge of its own list.
One of the most successful slave traders on the eighteenth-century Gold Coast, and one of the few who built himself a private fort.
Richard Brew was born around 1725 in Ennis, County Clare, Ireland, and came to the Gold Coast in 1745 in the service of the Royal African Company. He worked as a registrar at Cape Coast Castle, as chief factor at Tantumquery, and at Dixcove, before becoming governor of the fort at Anomabu, in 1756–60 and again in 1761–64. In 1764 he cut his ties with the Company to trade on his own account.
His house went up in the early 1760s, begun around 1761–63. Dr Micots names Thomas Trinder, the Company's overseer of works, and Captain John Baugh as the likely builders. It was a two-storey Irish Georgian mansion in the Palladian manner, with a central entrance, arched windows and a symmetrical front, set down beside a slave fort on the African coast.
Brew married into Anomabu's leading family. His wife Effua Ansah was the daughter of Eno Baisie Kurentsi, the most powerful Fante leader in the town, and they had two daughters. Two sons from an earlier marriage to a local woman were educated in England and came back to the coast in 1768.
Local tradition in Anomabu says the house was built for Brew's wife and his mistresses. We record that as what is said locally. The documents we have seen speak of two marriages to local women, and of nothing more.
Brew died on 5 August 1776, deep in debt; his business partner in England had already gone bankrupt. His will divided "all my house slaves & men and women … artificers coopers washers and labourers" among his family.
Castle Brew was not only a home. According to Dr Micots, the courtyard, and perhaps the warehouses behind the house, served as holding cells: for overflow prisoners from Fort William, and for captives Brew had bought for himself, to sell on. The house was run by enslaved domestic workers.
That makes Castle Brew a private slave fort. It was built and run by one trader for his own profit, next to the official fort, outside the Company's walls. That puts it in a small, little-known group of Gold Coast buildings, together with Richter's Fort in Osu and Franklin House in Jamestown.
What stands today is a compound of three parts in a row, built over more than a century.
Builds the two-storey mansion, the right-hand part of today's compound. Home, trading base and holding place for captives until his death in 1776.
Takes the house over from Brew's bankrupt estate, against £115 owed locally and some £7,000 owed to creditors in London. For a time it is known as Smith House.
The Scottish merchant, later Judicial Assessor at Cape Coast and author of Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa, adds the middle wing.
The Fante merchant (1809–1898) receives the business and the house from Cruickshank when he leaves the coast in 1854, almost half a century after Britain abolished its slave trade. He adds the left wing, in stone and brick, in the late 1860s or early 1870s.
In the 1960s the Monuments Board restores Brew's house and the Cruickshank wing, adding cement plaster and paint; the Blankson wing is left unplastered. Around 2016 the Blankson family regains ownership through the courts.
How to recognise it: in Dr Micots' 2009 photograph the compound reads from right to left as Brew's original house, the Cruickshank wing, and the bare, unplastered Blankson wing. Read her study, with photographs and a plan of the compound: Micots, African Studies Quarterly 16/1 (2015), PDF.
Anyone who knows Jamestown will look twice at the Blankson wing. Its south front, of stone and brick from the early 1870s, bears a striking resemblance to the later building phases of Fort Visão, today's Franklin House, on Brazil Lane in Accra. We are comparing it with Franklin House's later additions, not with its seventeenth-century core.
The two have more in common than looks. Both are two-storey buildings around a courtyard. Both were private places where enslaved people were held: Franklin House has holding rooms with iron bars set into the floor and a raised platform in the courtyard thought to be an auction block. Both were altered again and again, and both ended up as family homes.
What we can and cannot say. The likeness is our own observation. No source we have found links Brew, Cruickshank or Blankson to the Jamestown building. Nineteenth-century merchants from Axim to Accra built in a shared coastal style, and that alone could explain it. But the comparison is worth making, and we will photograph both from the same angle. More on Fort Visão.
The Ghana Museums and Monuments Board restored this building in the 1960s. Sixty years later, its public listing still calls it "The Little Fort at Anomabu … preserved as a ruin", with no name, no builder and no history. It is not a ruin: it is a standing, lived-in compound, and its history is in print.
That is still the finding. The Board lists a monument it once restored, and its guides next door cannot point to it. We have written more about how Ghana's heritage bodies document, and fail to document, the sites in their care on GhanaMuseums.com.
When the Asante army under Osei Bonsu reached the coast, it attacked Anomabu in June 1807. The fighting centred on the big British fort, today's Fort William, defended by a small garrison under Governor George Torrane. The fort held, but the Fante of the town were slaughtered outside its walls. The war that led to it began in 1806, which is why the battle is often dated to that year. Castle Brew stood fifty yards away.
The Asante side of these wars: Kumasi Fort and Nana Yaa Asantewaa. The men who fought and governed on this coast: Names of Past and Present.
What happened to the people of Anomabu in 1806 and 1807 is told on our Cape Coast site, as history stories built on the documented events.
The Battle of Anomabo: the Asante war reaches the coast, and the town beneath Fort William pays the price.
The years of war on the Fante coast, from the first Asante invasion to 1814.
What was left of the town, and of its people, after the attack.
Anomabu is on the main Cape Coast–Accra road, roughly 16 kilometres east of Cape Coast. Any trotro on that road will stop.
Walk to Fort William and look for the two-storey house with its wings about fifty yards from the fort's north-western corner.
Castle Brew is private family property, not a museum. Look from outside, ask before photographing people, and do not enter without permission.
Beach lodges at Anomabu, or Cape Coast. Options on ghanahotels.biz.
Bookings through this widget earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. No operator has paid to appear on this page. No tour we know of mentions Castle Brew.
One of the largest British forts on the coast, the scene of the Asante attack of 1807, and Castle Brew's neighbour.
On Brazil Lane, beside Brazil House. Holding rooms, a presumed auction platform, and later additions that look remarkably like Castle Brew's Blankson wing.
A slave fort run by Ga brothers, the third private fort of this kind on the coast.
Built by the English as Fort Kormantin, taken by the Dutch in 1665. The origin of the name Coromantee.
The first Dutch fort on the Gold Coast, a few kilometres west towards Cape Coast.
Another protected ruin for which the official record says, in effect, nothing.
All of them, in order: Forts and Castles of Ghana.
The "Little Fort at Anomabu" was never lost. It is Castle Brew: a slave trader's mansion that doubled as a private holding place for captives, built in the early 1760s beside the Company's fort, extended by a Scotsman and a Fante merchant, restored by the state in the 1960s and then forgotten by it. Go and look at it from the street. And when the Board's guides at Fort William tell you there is nothing else to see in Anomabu, you will know better.
Verified: 28 September 2026. The identification of the Little Fort as Castle Brew (aban kakraba), its builders, dates, owners, use as a holding place for captives and 1960s restoration follow the published research of Courtnay Micots (2015, 2023), with Brew's biography and will also from Briony Widdis (Queen's University Belfast). The 1854 transfer to George Kuntu Blankson follows standard accounts of Blankson's life. The "mistresses" are local tradition, not documented fact. The likeness to Franklin House is our own observation; no documentary link is claimed. The Board's listing is quoted as published. Our earlier suggestion that the Little Fort was the Dutch lodge of 1640 was wrong and has been withdrawn. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.