Buchanan stands on the Atlantic coast of Grand Bassa, a region long inhabited by Bassa communities with their own political, commercial, and cultural networks. Coastal trade connected local producers and brokers to other West African ports and Atlantic merchants before Liberia was founded. In the nineteenth century, colonization societies promoted settlements for free and formerly enslaved Black people from the United States, creating new towns while claiming land through agreements made under unequal power and often interpreted differently by settlers and Indigenous communities.

Settlements at Edina, Bassa Cove, and nearby locations developed through initiatives associated with American colonization organizations. Conflict, disease, limited supplies, and disputes over land made survival precarious. Buchanan emerged as the principal coastal town and was named for Thomas Buchanan, a colonial official and relative of future United States president James Buchanan. Americo-Liberian settlers established churches, schools, government offices, farms, and trading houses, while Bassa residents remained essential to commerce and labor but faced political exclusion.

After Liberia declared independence in 1847, Buchanan became an important center of Grand Bassa County. Its port exported agricultural and forest products and linked the region to Monrovia and international shipping. Mission institutions and schools expanded, and local markets brought together rural producers, coastal traders, settlers, and foreign firms. The town's social geography reflected national inequalities between Americo-Liberian elites and Indigenous majorities, though intermarriage, migration, religious change, and shared economic life made those categories more complicated in practice.

Industrial development transformed Buchanan in the twentieth century. A deepwater port and railroad connected iron-ore operations in the interior to the coast, bringing workers, infrastructure, and international investment. Rapid growth created new neighborhoods and opportunities but tied the local economy to global commodity prices and concession politics. Liberia's civil wars from 1989 to 2003 brought displacement, violence, damaged services, and interrupted industry. The port and transport corridor also made Buchanan strategically important to armed factions and later reconstruction.

Present-day Buchanan is a living city rather than a uniformly preserved historic district. Older churches, residences, street patterns, cemeteries, and civic sites survive amid rebuilding and expanding port activity. Historical interpretation must avoid treating colonization as an empty-land story. The city's importance comes from the continuing encounter among Bassa communities, settlers of African American and Caribbean background, missionaries, industrial laborers, companies, and the Liberian state. Preservation is inseparable from documenting oral histories and ordinary neighborhoods before redevelopment removes evidence that formal monuments have rarely represented.