Stonington — After 250 years, Venture Smith is back in town — or at least his profound, succinct prose is, quoted on a tall wood-framed sign erected beside the land he once farmed to buy his own freedom.

“I asked my master one time if he would consent to have me purchase my freedom,” reads the excerpt from Smith’s autobiography, published in New London in 1798. “I paid an enormous sum for my freedom, seventy-one pounds and two shillings … My freedom is a privilege which nothing else can equal.”

Last week, the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection installed the sign along a trail at the Barn Island Wildlife Management Area that passes the two dozen-acre plot where Smith, captured as a boy in central Africa and brought to this country as a slave in 1739, grew the vegetables he sold to pay his way out of bondage. After obtaining his own freedom, he farmed, cut and sold wood and worked various other enterprises for 10 years to buy his two sons and his wife Meg’s freedom.

Ultimately, he became a prosperous farmer of property at the the site of the former Connecticut Yankee nuclear power plant in East Haddam, but Barn Island is where his quest began. The site is located less than a mile from the Stewart Road access to Barn Island, the secondary entrance to the popular hiking, boating and hunting area.

“What we have here is one of the major national black history sites, unique in all North America,” said Chandler Saint, the historian who helped found the Documenting Venture Smith Project in 2005 to research and bring public awareness to the extraordinary story. “They (DEEP) have clearly embraced the whole thing, because they realize how important it is.”

Today at 12:30 p.m., a ceremony unveiling the sign will take place, with Smith’s descendants and Reps. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, and Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, among the list of speakers. DeLauro and Courtney last month introduced a resolution in Congress to make April 10 “Venture Smith Freedom Day” to mark Smith’s achievement.

DEEP’s Deputy Commissioner Susan Whalen will also speak. DEEP agreed to install the posts for the sign, donated by Saint, "because we had a desire to commemorate that very significant historical event,” she said last week.

“We wanted to commemorate this remarkable human being, who through perseverance and hard work overcame a lot of adversity,” she said. “It’s a significant event in Connecticut and human history.”

In the future, she said, DEEP would like to have an archeological excavation done at the location of Smith’s farm.

“But we have no immediate plans,” she added.

Saint, author of two books on Venture Smith, said that along with the sign and Congressional resolution, two other significant events have taken place this year to mark the 250th anniversary of Smith obtaining his freedom after 26 years as a slave. The sum he paid, he added, was the equivalent of about five to seven years’ wages in Colonial times.

The anniversary was recently recognized in Hull, England, the home of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, where Saint spoke last week. In Ghana, where the port city of Anomabu that Smith and thousands of other captured Africans were imprisoned before being sent into slavery, is currently displaying an exhibit about Smith. The exhibit will move to the Hartford Public Library in October, Saint said.

“Venture Smith is a role model for the small villages in Ghana, that a human being has the right to be free and that they don’t have to sell their children into bonded labor, if they develop ethical businesses,” Saint said. “This last year has been extremely important, because we’ve turned a corner from research and documentation to public education and awareness.”

Smith’s story, he said, is relevant to the struggles for equality people are still fighting today, from Baltimore to Ferguson, Mo., to Africa.

“The people protesting over their civil rights and freedom, that’s what we look to Venture for — self-liberation,” Saint said.

j.benson@theday.com

Twitter: @BensonJudy