PART IV

The Fall of the Plantation System, 1848 - 1917

On the eve of emancipation, fifteen of St. John's seventy-seven estates were engaged in sugarcane cultivation, and there were still 1,677 enslaved individuals on the island [SLA, 1847]. Upon the transition to ruminative labor it became evident that many workers would not willingly remain in servitude to their former slave-masters. Although a restrictive labor act which bound the workers to the estates under inequitable contracts was quickly imposed, after 1848 the number of workers on most St. John plantations began to decline. Some laborers sought to improve their situations by vying for positions of employment on estates which offered greater benefits, had more desirable living conditions, or less abusive overseers. But, many simply moved away as their contracts expired. Most of those who left the estates headed for St. Thomas in search of greater economic opportunity; others went "squatting" and lived by provision farming, fishing, or lime and charcoal making. Still, for many years the majority of St. John workers continued to live on the estates under the same harsh conditions that had prevailed prior to emancipation [SJLD,1851-54].

What immediate effect emancipation had on the Cinnamon Bay plantation can not be easily determined from the archival record. After 1848 the yearly tax rolls for the islands become less informative, and it is not until ten years later that they once again become a viable reference tool for tracking year to year changes on the rural estates. While we are fortunate to have many other types of supporting documentation for this era, individually a general lack of continuity makes them difficult to interpret within the broader context of this era. But by merging data extracted from a variety of little utilized resources, we can construct a remarkably vivid image of the 19 year period which marks the downfall of the plantation system on the Cinnamon Bay property.

Contrary to what might be supposed, emancipation seems to have had little initial impact on the productivity of the Cinnamon Bay estate. In fact, the records show that aside from a slight dip in the sugar yield in 1848, the estate's output remained quite high throughout this period. In the three years prior to emancipation, Cinnamon Bay produced an average of 67,163 pounds of sugar and 108.5 gallons of rum per year. Although sugar production did indeed fall to 62,974 pounds in 1848, rum production increased significantly to 3,232 gallons. Over the course of the next three years, both sugar and rum production remained well above the pre-emancipation levels, reaching a peak in 1851 when 74,862 pounds of sugar and 3,788 gallons of rum were produced. Surprisingly, in the years just after emancipation the number of workers on the Cinnamon Bay plantation also increased. While there had been 87 slaves on the estate in the year preceding emancipation, by 1850 the number of workers had risen to 107 individuals. After 1851, however, both production figures and the number of laborers began to decline (see Appendix I, Charts 2 & 4; and, Appendix II, Table D) [SJRD, 1845-58; SJA, 1847-58].

The fact that immediately following emancipation production on the Cinnamon Bay estate continued at high levels, and its worker population actually increased, suggests that conditions at Cinnamon Bay may not have been as harsh as on some other estates. Certainly the bay-side setting of the laborers three acre "village" allowed them the opportunity to fish and easily harvest seafood such as conch and welk; and the positioning of the estate on the island's lush north side meant that under normal weather conditions provision grounds would have flourished. So it might be considered that once achieving freedom some individuals might simply have been reluctant to move away from the security of their homes and family to venture forth into the unknowns of the burgeoning free society. In fact, from the transcript of a court hearing held in 1854, we learn of a case where a slave by the name of Christian Frederik, who had "evaded" the Cinnamon Bay estate for Tortola on November 5, 1843, returned after emancipation and was employed there as a carpenter. It was also revealed at the same hearing that two woman, Hester and Augusta, who had fled along with Christian Frederik in 1843, on at least one occasion after emancipation had returned to the estate to visit with family and friends who still lived on the property [SOFS, 1854]. But it must be kept in mind that ignorance, poverty, and limited opportunity, were the primary tools by which colonial society maintained its control over the underprivileged masses, and this did not somehow miraculously change upon von Scholten's proclamation of freedom from slavery. While it is quite evident that in the period following emancipation the former slaves increasingly tested the constraints of colonial society and challenged the status quo, in the end it was not solely the will of the people that extinguished the ovens over which kettles of sugar juices boiled, nor stilled the perpetually revolving mills that crushed cane stalks into magass, but disease and a series of devastating natural disasters [SJLD, 1851-70; SJRD, 1845-70].

The Cholera Epidemic of 1853 - 1854 and its Aftermath

Early on a Friday morning in December, 1853, three fishermen from the Hull plantation on the north shore of St. Thomas gave aid to a sailing vessel which appeared to be drifting and in distress. Unbeknownst to the fishermen the vessel was a plague ship, and the gifts from the passengers, which they had taken home as rewards for their assistance, were infected with a deadly strain of Asiatic Cholera [STPP, 1853-55].

It was not until December 16 that the outbreak of the disease at Hull was first reported to the authorities, by which time it had already claimed many lives among the workers on that estate. Despite efforts to quarantine the area the sickness continued to spread. Within a weeks time, it made its way over the hills and down into Charlotte Amalie where it spread like wildfire amongst the overcrowded shanties of the hundreds of newly freed workers who had only recently converged on the town. As the New Year approached, the death toll ran as high as sixty persons per day: and the outbreak had only just begun [STMC, 1853-54].

The people of Danish West Indies had long known their share of sickness and disease. Outbreaks of yellow fever and small pox were regular occurrences, and malaria and leprosy were always present. But in past years it had mostly been the busy port of Charlotte Amalie, with its polluted harbor, poor sanitation system and a constant flow of transient seaman, which had taken the brunt of disease. On the estates, the restrictions of slavery had resulted in a rural population who lived primarily in widely separated, and therefore, well insulated villages: a situation which made an outbreak of sickness relatively easy to contain, and outside intrusion difficult. But with emancipation had come increased mobility, and it was this newly acquired freedom of movement which made the 1853 cholera epidemic so impossible to forestall.

As early as December 19, various leaflets had begun to circulate throughout the islands warning of the severity of the outbreak, informing people of the symptoms, and suggesting precautions and treatments for the disease [STMC, 1853-54]. The owners or managers of all rural estates were instructed to immediately report any instances of sickness or death that occurred on their properties, and travel between the islands was closely monitored. For a time it appeared as though the disease might be contained to St. Thomas, but on January 1, 1854, the Land-bailiff on St. John received a hastily penned note informing him that a death had taken place on one of the estates (see Appendix III, document 9):

Once the cholera reached St. John it quickly spread until no quarter was spared the ravages of the disease. At Cinnamon Bay Thomas Ivinson and his young friend and associate, A. C. Hill, desperately struggled to curb the outbreak and save as many lives as they could. The task, as expressed in their own words in a series of urgent communications to Judge Hanschell in Cruz Bay, was both daunting and horrifying:

It was never conclusively determined how the cholera was transported to St. John; nor was it found how the first case at Cinnamon Bay became infected. But it was revealed in Ivinson's note to Judge Hanschell on January 7, 1854, that the child who died on January 1 had not been the first death from cholera on the Cinnamon Bay plantation, only the first that had been recognized and reported as such. On December 29, 1853, Ivinson's forty-five year old overseer, John Charles, had died of the disease. It is quite possible that Charles, whose position afforded him greater freedom of movement, and who perhaps had occasionally been sent to St. Thomas on estate errands, was the vehicle by which the cholera had spread to Cinnamon Bay [SJLD, 1853-54].

In April, after the outbreak had finally subsided, an accounting of the death toll in the epidemic was compiled. According to the official report of the Crown's Physician, in the four months that the cholera had gripped St. John nearly 10% of its population had succumbed to the disease. Among the places hardest hit were Harmanfarm, with 28 deaths; Cinnamon Bay, with 27; Enighed, with 25; and, the town of Cruz Bay, where 20 deaths occurred. But no single location seems to have suffered as great a loss as the Beverhoudtsberg plantation, where the 29 deaths represented a total depopulation of the estate [STMC, 1853-54; SJR, 1850].

The lasting effects of the cholera epidemic on the Cinnamon Bay plantation are clearly evident from the archival record. With unhealthy conditions lingering on the property, it became increasingly difficult to convince the workers to remain on the estate. As labor shortages drove down the amount of land which could be maintained under cultivation, both production levels and the overall value of the Cinnamon Bay property plummeted (see Charts 2, 3 & 4 on the following pages; also Appendix I, Charts 2, 3 & 4; and, Appendix II, Table D). In 1855, when Thomas Ivinson took on a six year mortgage for the purchase of the estate from his remaining partner William Dawson, Dawson's 2/3 share of Cinnamon Bay was valued at only $3,000. As security for this debt, Ivinson was forced to put up the whole of the estate with "its works, futures, utensils, stock, crops (standing or taken off), and all appurtenances of whatever description." It was further agreed that he was not to "dismantle the estate or dispose of stock and inventory as long as any part of the bond should remain unpaid" [SJLPD, 1856].

Chart 2: Laborers on the Cinnamon Bay plantation, 1755 - 1875

Chart 3: Acres in sugarcane cultivation on the Cinnamon Bay plantation, 1845 - 1868

Chart 4: Sugar production in pounds on the Cinnamon Bay plantation, 1845 - 1864

Thomas Ivinson did not survive to pay off his mortgage to William Dawson. In fact, only a few months before his death, Ivinson further indebted himself to Joseph Plaskett of St. Croix for the sum of $1,500 [SJLPD, 1857]. An appraisal of the Cinnamon Bay plantation, which was carried out at the time of this indenture, provides us with our first evaluation of the property in the post-emancipation period. Though brief, the following extract offers a clear picture of the rapidly diminishing fortunes of the once grand Cinnamon Bay estate:

[SJLPD, 1857]

Upon the death of Thomas Ivinson in the Summer of 1857, the Cinnamon Bay property was put up for public auction. On that occasion the value of the property was evaluated to be $6,745; however, the appraisers saw fit to add a notation at the end of the document stating that the plantation's true worth, "if it were to be sold man to man," was only 6,000 Danish West Indies Rigsdalers (for complete copy of evaluation see Appendix III, document 10) [SJLPD, 1857].

The final attempt to restore sugar production on the Cinnamon Bay estate, 1858 - 1868

It is not clear from the records if the Cinnamon Bay property was actually purchased at auction after Ivinson's death. There is evidence which suggests that it simply fell into a brief period of receivership before changing hands with no cash transaction ever having taken place. Tax and deed documents show a R. F. Barner in possession of the estate by the end of 1857, but they reveal little information as to his true relationship to the property. A St. John census taken only weeks after Ivinson's death on October 15, 1857, recorded the property as belonging to "the heirs of Thomas Ivinson." Listed as the manager of the property was a twenty-five year old native of Tortola, William Henry Marsh, who in the 1855 census had been the overseer of the Beverhoudtsberg plantation owned by A. C. Hill. Also in residence at that time were Ivinson's common-law wife, Martha Johns, who was recorded as a "washer," and her three surviving children, Elizabeth, Thomas, and James Ivinson. But, by 1858 it is apparent that Abraham Chalwell Hill had added Estate Cinnamon Bay to the growing list of St. John properties he had acquired, which by that date also included, Susannaberg & Denis Bay, Beverhoudtsberg, and a house in the town of Cruz Bay [SJR, 1850, 1855 & 1857; SLA, 1857-58; STM, 1857-58].

Abraham Chalwell Hill

The name A. C. Hill first appears in records relating to Cinnamon Bay during the 1852-53 cholera epidemic. His note to Judge Hanschell, written from America Hill on January 12, 1854, in which he stated, "Mr. Ivinson begs me to inform you that he has moved up here and that the laborers have moved into his dwelling at the works," suggests that Hill was living in the Cinnamon Bay estate house during this time period. But who was this A. C. Hill, what was he doing at America Hill, and how did he come to purchase the estate?

Born in Tortola in 1825, Abraham Chalwell Hill (or A. C. Hill as he is most often referred to in documents) was a grandson of Abraham Chalwell Hill, a Tortola planter who moved to St. John in 1811 and purchased six Maho Bay Quarter properties to form the vast Abraham's Fancy plantation. A. C. was the son of Abraham Hill's younger son, George Hill, a planter and heir to the Hill family property in the British Virgin Islands. After his father died some time in or before 1846 [SJR, 1846], A. C. became the ward of his uncle Henry Jennings Hill, who was the oldest son of Abraham Chalwell Hill and one of the heirs to the Abraham's Fancy plantation on St. John.¹ As a result, A. C. Hill was brought up among the extended Hill families of Tortola, St. Croix and St. John. It is not known who A. C. Hill's mother was, but as both his father and uncle, as well as two of his three aunts, appear in the 1831 Register of Free Coloreds, A. C. was to some degree a person of mixed European and African heritage [SJRFC, 1831; SJLUC, 1863; SJLRTP, 1819].

In 1853, at the age of twenty-eight, A. C. Hill married Amelia Plaskett, the twenty-four year old daughter of the deceased Major Joseph Plaskett of St. Croix. Clearly Amelia's guardians were none to sure of the abilities, or intentions, of the cocky young Tortola Creole she had chosen to wed, so before the couple was allowed to marry a prenuptial agreement was prepared and signed by all parties concerned. According to this document, A. C. Hill was to have access to no more than $4,000 of his wife's inheritance, and no claim whatsoever to her estate in the event she predeceased him. The balance of Amelia's fortune was to be kept securely invested to her benefit by appointed guardians [SJCP, 1863].

It is from the Hills' prenuptial agreement that we first learn that one of Amelia Plaskett's two guardians had been none other than William Dawson Esquire, the (on paper) partner of Thomas Ivinson, and later, the holder of Ivinson's first priority mortgage against the Cinnamon Bay estate. It will be remembered that just prior to Ivinson's death he also borrowed a sum of money from Amelia Hill's father, Joseph Plaskett, and backed that loan up with a second mortgage on the property. As Joseph Plaskett was long deceased at the time this loan was made, it is reasonable to conclude that the money had come from Amelia's inherited estate -- the very same estate which quite likely had provided the financial backing for Thomas Ivinson to acquire the Cinnamon Bay property in the first place. The fact that at no time during his tenure did Ivinson actually hold a free and clear controlling interest in Cinnamon Bay property explains why he and his family did not occupy the estate's main residence on America Hill. This privilege would have been reserved for those powerful shadow figures who actually controlled the property: William Dawson, the heirs of Joseph Plaskett, and now by marriage, A. C. Hill.

And so, as we begin to break through the labyrinth of paperwork concerning the finances of the Cinnamon Bay estate, the situation surrounding A. C Hill's acquisition of the property can be viewed more clearly. Upon Thomas Ivinson's death, the obvious inability of his heirs to pay off the mortgages on the property left A. C. and Amelia Hill in a position to leverage for possession of the Cinnamon Bay estate. Especially in light of the fact that Hill not only held a power of attorney to act for the creditors in Thomas Ivinson's probate proceedings, but also served as the appointed executor of Ivinson's estate [SJLPD, 1857; SJCP, 1863].

Immediately after acquiring the Cinnamon Bay estate, A. C. Hill vigorously set about the task of getting the property's sugar works back into maximum production. By 1860 the property was once again consistently producing over 20,000 pounds of sugar per year, and despite a continuing decline in the number of laborers on the property, over the course of Hill's short tenure (1858 - 1863) the amount of land planted in sugarcane rose from twenty-eight to forty acres (see Appendix I, Charts II, III, & IV). With all of the manpower of estates Susannaberg and Denis Bay, Beverhoudtsberg, and Cinnamon Bay at his disposal, A. C. made a practice of shifting the workers from estate to estate in order to maximize the efficiency of his labor force.² Despite increasing unrest amongst his laborers, Hill persevered. And by 1860, through unyielding strength of character and sheer determination, he nearly single-handedly had reinvigorated sugar production on St. John. In December of 1862, when he signed an agreement to purchase estates Annaberg and Leinster Bay from the heirs of Governor H. H. Berg, Hill had gained control over six of the eleven St. John plantations still engaged in sugar production -- properties with a combined land area of 1,831 acres. In 1862 alone, on the plantations that Hill managed or owned, 276,709 pounds of sugar were produced. Setting out each morning to inspect his fields, Hill surely took the time to pause at various vantage points and gaze out over his vast domain. At thirty-eight years of age A. C. Hill had become the single most powerful man on St. John; the master of all he surveyed [SJLD, 1857-63; SJLUC, 1857-63; SJRD, 1857-63; SJA, 1857-63].

But the empire that A. C. Hill created would prove to be much more fragile than anyone could have expected. When Hill died at America Hill on April 18, 1863, all of his properties immediately plunged into bankruptcy. With no male heir of legal age, and no one capable or willing to take over his broad holdings as a single estate, all of Hill's properties either reverted to their creditors or were auctioned off piecemeal in order to cover his many outstanding debts. Amelia, her fortune still secure due to the prenuptial agreement she and Abraham had entered into before their marriage, purchased whatever household items she cared to retain at her husband's probate auction, and along with her five young children³ returned home to St. Croix [SJLRAP, 1863; SJCP, 1863].

Postscript to A. C. Hill

Over the last few decades much has been written about A. C. Hill. So much so that the image of a dashing young planter and his family living lives of opulence in their grand estate house atop America Hill has emerged as St. John legend. It is therefore a striking realization to learn that the life of this native son from Tortola, the grandson of a English planter and an enslaved woman from the island of Antigua, was in reality very short, and that his fleeting career as a planter was something far from glorious [SJRFC, 1831; SJLRTP, 1819]. While it is indeed likely that A. C. and Amelia had lived in the house at America Hill for a brief period in the early 1850s, once they acquired the devastated Beverhoudtsberg plantation after the cholera epidemic in 1854, the couple moved into the modest dwelling house on that estate. Island-wide censuses taken in 1855, 1857 and 1860, indicate that the Hills continued to live in the area near Beverhoudtsberg throughout this period, and it was not until only a short time before Abraham's death that they once again returned to live in the house at America Hill [SJR, 1855, 1857 & 1860; SJA, 1857-63; SJLRAP, 1863; SJCP, 1863]. Further, numerous communications, between Hill and the St. John government administrator, paint Hill as a headstrong and difficult individual, someone constantly at odds with his laborers, neighbors, and the Danish government. By today's perspectives, A. C. Hill comes across as a relic of a dying age: an individual who still embraced the personal perceptions of superiority and authoritarianism born of the plantocratic society of the eighteenth century. In short, a man who had outlived his time [SJLUC, 1863].

The end of the sugar production at Cinnamon Bay

On July 21, 1863, John William Weinmar purchased title to the Cinnamon Bay estate at A. C. Hill's probate auction for the sum of 5, 671.6 Rigsdalers [SJLRAP, 1863].

Born on St. Thomas in 1814, John Weinmar was a member of a large and prosperous local planter family whose broad land holdings had at one time rivaled those of the extended Hill clan. By 1863, however, the Weinmar family dynasty had diminished to only a shadow of its former glory, and by the time John Weinmar acquired Cinnamon Bay his only other property on St. John was the struggling Enighed plantation in the Cruz Bay Quarter. Like A. C. Hill, Weinmar was a headstrong product of the Danish West Indies plantocracy, raised, like his father and uncles before him, to be a sugar planter. It will be recalled that the Weinmar name had first been associated with the Cinnamon Bay estate back in its heyday at the turn of the nineteenth century when John William's uncles, Ernst and Fritz Weinmar, had been managers of the estate under Captain Cronenberg.

By acquiring Cinnamon Bay Weinmar had gained control over 10% of the remaining 559 acres left under sugarcane cultivation on St. John. With Cinnamon Bay producing more than 20,000 pounds of sugar yearly from its sixty acres of cane fields, Weinmar hoped to build upon A. C. Hill's efforts toward reinvigorating St. John's sugar industry. But Weinmar's plans were doomed to failure from the very outset. Intermittent reoccurrence of both cholera and yellow fever, along with mounting dissension among the underpaid field laborers, relentlessly undermined the production capabilities of his estates. As the number of workers declined, production levels lapsed into a downward spiral. By 1866, the last full year of Weinmar's short four year ownership, there were only twenty-four laborers employed on the Cinnamon Bay plantation, and a scant thirty acres remained planted in sugarcane. For their services the field laborers were being paid from $1.00 to $2.00 a month; skilled laborers received $2.50; and the estate's "driver" took in $3.00. As sugar production fell to its lowest levels in the history of the colony, Weinmar desperately attempted to utilize his influence as a member of the Danish West Indies Colonial Council to fight mandated labor reforms which he believed were destroying the profitability of the plantations. But while Weinmar heatedly debated his case, nature was gathering forces to unleash a chain of events that were to be far more influential to the future of the St. John sugar industry than all of his political wrangling.

The year 1867 had started off on an optimistic note. On January 27, the King's Physician on St. Thomas announced that the cholera, which had periodically broken out with various degrees of severity since 1853, was now to be considered "terminated." The announcement was qualified however, with the statement that the disease, "probably may now and again appear in diverse instances." But 1867 was not to be a year that would bring any degree of relief from the diminishing fortunes of the Danish West Indies colony. Around mid day on October 29, the islands of St. John and St. Thomas were once again struck by a devastating hurricane. Although barometric readings did not drop to the levels attained in the hurricane of 1837, several accounts portray this storm as the most destructive cyclone in the history of the colony [Tidende, Nov. 13, 1867; Simmons, ND; Atlanten, 1905]. No first hand descriptions of this event are available for St. John, but a feeling for the magnitude of the storm can be gleaned from a letter written by the publisher of the St. Thomas Tidende newspaper, John Benners, to his young daughter who was attending school in the United States:

As the people of the Danish West Indies struggled to put their lives back in order after the storm, no one could have foreseen that the devastation they had just experienced was only a precursor of events yet to come. Less than three weeks had passed after the hurricane, when, on October 18, at 2:45 in the afternoon, two violent and consecutive earthquakes, with a combined duration of nearly two minutes, rocked the entire Danish West Indies colony. The quakes were soon followed by a series of tsunamis which swept far inland destroying everything that lay in their paths. Reported as far east as Coral Bay on St. John, and as far west as Puerto Rico, the tidal waves proved devastating to marine interests and did considerable damage to any building situated in low lying areas along St. Thomas and St. John's south shores. But it was the shocks from the quakes that dealt out the most destruction on land. Far from a singular occurrence, a hyperactive period of seismic activity was experienced throughout the colony for well over two months after the initial shocks occurred. In the twenty-four hours following the initial quakes, eighty-nine aftershocks were felt. And in the succeeding two days, one hundred and twelve more tremors were recorded [HR, 1867; Tidende, 1867].

It was reported that the islands soon took on the character of a county under siege. Buildings everywhere lay wracked or in ruin. Fearful of being crushed by falling debris, the islands' citizens set up tents on the hillsides in which they lived as refugees until they were convinced that the danger had passed [Simmons, ND]. The events of 1867 were so devastating to the St. John economy that no tax rolls were compiled for the island in that year. But, when the accounts were resumed in 1868, the widespread damage to St. John's struggling sugar industry become vividly apparent. Where their had been eleven sugar plantations with a total of four hundred and eighteen acres in sugarcane prior to 1867, by 1868 only five estates remained in production, and the amount of land in cane had fallen to only one hundred and forty acres. Among the sugar plantations which ceased production during this time period was the once prosperous and valuable Estate Cinnamon Bay [SJA, 1867-69].

From Plantation to Pasture

Carl Alexander Lindqvist acquired Cinnamon Bay in December of 1867 after the property was put up for sale due to Weinmar's nonpayment of taxes [STM, 1867-68]. Born in Denmark in 1808, Lindqvist had come out to St. Croix in 1834 where he married Margaret Armstrong and settled down to raise a family. In about 1857, Carl and his family moved to St. John where he had taken the job of manager on the Carolina plantation in Coral Bay. In 1866, at the age of fifty-eight, Carl Lindqvist elevated his position to planter, by the purchase of the landlocked Rustenberg plantation -- a property he soon sold after acquiring the neighboring Cinnamon Bay estate one year later [SJA, 1867-70; SJR, 1860].

Immediately after taking over Cinnamon Bay, Lindqvist set out to covert the property from a labor intensive, high overhead sugar plantation, to a low maintenance, livestock and dairy operation. Where there had not been more than one cow recorded on the plantation in any given year since emancipation, by 1868 Lindqvist had thirty-one head of cattle, four horses, and ten goats grazing on Cinnamon Bay's thirty-five acres of pasture. As for laborers, in 1866 there had still been thirty individuals employed on the estate, now only seven people (two men, three women, and two children), were at work on its grounds (see Chart 5; also Appendix I, Chart 3, 4, & 5) [SLA, 1866-68] .

Chart 5: The attempt to convert the Estate Cinnamon Bay to a large scale

cattle operation after the cessation of sugar production in 1867

For three years Lindqvist continued to convert more and more of Cinnamon Bay's cane fields to grazing, and by 1870 there were forty head of cattle and fifty-one acres of pasture on the estate. But, after 1871 the amount of land in pasture began to slowly diminish, and with it both the amount of livestock and the number of laborers also started to decline (see Chart 5 above) [SJA, 1868-78].

In 1871 Lindqvist began to parcel out land within his estate. In that year, a four acre parcel which included the house on America Hill, was deeded to A. C. Hill's niece, Elizabeth Trumbull (parcel 2d); a ten acre plot, which later would come to be called "Mailand," was deeded to his son-in-law, Jacob Samuel Hill, in 1880 (parcel 2c); and, a short time later, a fifty-two and three-quarters acre parcel at Peter Bay was set aside for his daughter Eleonora and her husband Edgar Harthmann (parcel 2aa). When Carl Lindqvist died in 1884, at the age of seventy-four, his wife, Margaret, remained in undivided possession of the remaining 233¼ acres of the Cinnamon Bay estate, which were reportedly all "in bush." An appraisal of the property, taken during Carl Lindqvist's probate proceedings, provides us with one final evaluation of the Cinnamon Bay estate before Margaret Lindqvist dispersed the remainder of the property amongst her heirs between 1894 and 1896 [STM, 1871-96; SJCP, 1884]:

John Emanuel Lindqvist and the Danish West Indies Plantation Company, 1894 - 1917

In February of 1894, Margaret Lindqvist deeded seventy-five acres of Estate Cinnamon Bay to her son, John Emanuel Lindqvist (parcel 2b), and soon after formally divided the remaining property into three equal parcels (2a, 2f, & 2e) which she deeded to her daughters, Caroline Amelia, Marie Eliza, and Georgianne Adriane. With this final disbursement of property amongst the heirs of Carl and Margaret Lindqvist in 1896, the Cinnamon Bay estate became divided into seven individual parcels. But this situation was only to last for a short period of time. Later in that same year, John Emanuel Lindqvist began to re-consolidate the property by purchasing America Hill from the youngest daughter of A. C. Hill, Ada Eliza Hill, who had inherited the parcel from her deceased cousin, Elizabeth Trumbull. And, in 1901, he acquired his sister Georgianne's fifty-two and three-quarters acre share in the estate. Subsequently, the estate was further re-consolidated in 1803, when the Danish West Indies Plantation Company purchased John Emanual, Caroline Amelia, and Marie Eliza Lindqvists' properties to once again form a single 233¼ acre property [STM, 1896-1903].

The Danish West Indies Plantation Company had been organized following the breakdown of negotiations to sell the islands to the United States in 1902, by a group of patriotic Danes, who hoped to revitalize agriculture throughout the three islands of the colony. While the company's main thrust was to revitalize the sugar industry on St. Croix, they also experimented with new methods of animal husbandry and farming. At Cinnamon Bay, where John Lindqvist had been retained as manager, the company engaged in fruit and vegetable cultivation, did some livestock breeding, and propagated the indigenous Myrtle, or Bay Tree, from which they distilled bay oil at the old plantation works [Edwards, 1993]. But the company's attempts to bring modern large scale agro-industrialization to the Danish West Indies met with little or no success. While to some degree the problems the company encountered can be blamed on a prolonged period of unusually dry weather conditions, their foremost obstacle was an inability to retain local laborers. Recruitment throughout the region of construction workers for the Panama Canal, along with the emergence of an organized labor movement in the colony, had driven wages beyond the Company's ability to pay [Westergaard, 1917]. Still, for over a decade the Company carried on, but in 1916 nature once again dealt a decisive blow.

On October 9, 1916, the island of St. John was struck by a powerful tropical cyclone. Across the island trees were stripped bare and buildings toppled [HR, 1916]. Anyone who has ever experienced one of these events can easily tell from the total decimation of the landscape evidenced in photographs taken after the hurricane had passed, that this was surely one the most violent storms to have ever effected the colony.

Soon after the cyclone passed, a small group of the remaining St. John planters put their signatures to a urgent letter to the Minister of Finance in Copenhagen. Their desperate appeal for relief from the many misfortunes that had long beset them, penned only two months before the transfer of the Danish West Indies colony to the United States, stands as a unique and indelible testament: a poignant postscript to the final days of the Danish colonial experience on the island of St. John (see Appendix III, document 11 for full copy):

The damaged Moravian Mission building and the decimated landscape of Coral Bay

after the passing of the 1916 hurricane

( detail from a photo in: Theodoor De Booy and John Faris, The Virgin Islands Our New Possessions and the British Islands

[ Philadelphia & London, J. B. Lippincott Company, 1918].)

¹ A. C. Hill first appears on St. John in the 1846 Census. At which time he was living on the Abraham's Fancy plantation owned by his bachelor uncle, Henry Jennings Hill, and his spinster sisters, Ruth Ann and Mary Hill, and their niece, Elizabeth Trumbull [SJR, 1846].

² After the death of his uncle Henry Jennings Hill sometime between 1846 and 1850, A. C. Hill also managed the affairs of his aunts' estate Abraham's Fancy [SJLRTP, 1819; SJR, 1846 & 1850].

³ The Hill children were: Henry Dawson, Edward William, Wilfred Joseph, George Sanford Plaskett and Ada Eliza Hill [SJR, 1860].