Dutch By Design: The Slave Plantation Ruins of St. John Island
Published On: December 14, 2016 Posted by: Jeremy Peterson
I recently had the opportunity to travel to the U.S. Virgin Islands. During the visit I took a ferry from St. Thomas where I was staying to Cruz Bay on St. John Island. St. John is a fairly small island with the majority of it being a National Park. The beauty is breathtaking. Yet, to contrast that beauty lay the ruins of the old slave plantations that operated on the island until 1848. I had an opportunity to explore them and learn a lot about construction in tropical climates.
St. John was a sugar producing slave colony in the 18th and 19th century.
The Dutch owned the islands and constructed windmills with giant rollers to crush sugar cane for the production of molasses and rum.
When the wind wasn’t blowing, horses were used to turn rollers housed in this circular corral.
The hills behind this building were terraced for the growing of sugar cane. From the rollers, juice from the sugar cane was transported to a distilling house where fires boiled the syrup and reduced it down to molasses.
The Dutch used a very particular style of tiny brick in their construction. You can compare that to the brick I found while visiting Amsterdam.
Despite these buildings being 300 years old, their walls are still standing. You can attribute that to their solid stone and brick construction. The humid and wet climate has leached the lime from the mortar over the years and National Park personnel have had to repoint many of the mortar seams. But, the Dutch clearly knew how to building something that would last…despite its sordid purpose.