Sugar Hill by the Sea: St Croix Inn USVI Rentals St Croix Lodging St Croix Guest House

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History
Renowned for their cannibalistic ways, the Caribs were equally ungracious in the first documented encounter with Europeans as Columbus and crew anchored at St. Croix’s Salt River entrance. In quest of fresh water they were accosted by a band of returning warriors. The date, November 14, 1493, gave occasion to St. Croix’s naming, Santa Cruz in Spanish, and as part of the Virgin Islands named after St. Ursula and her thousand virgins.

By the time that St. Croix was permanently settled in the early 1600’s, none of the approximately forty aboriginal village sites were any longer inhabited. Their artifacts can be seen as part of the Folmer Andersen Collection now property of the National Park Service in Christiansted. The St. George Botanical Gardens is situated near one of them. The last recorded sightings were those of Capt. John White in 1587 and in 1590 enroute to his Roanoke Island assignment by Sir Walter Raleigh.

English, Dutch, and French settlers vied for footholds on St. Croix and were repeatedly dislodged by Spaniards, resident on Puerto Rico. The Bassin Triangle area in Christiansted was a Dutch base. Southwest St. Croix was worked by English farmers. The English had a short-lived ascendancy that ended with a final Spanish massacre or expulsion in 1650, the latter’s last control of St. Croix which ended when driven out by the French under Governor DePoincy.

The French built an earthen fort at the mouth of Salt River opposite its headquarters in Judith’s Fancy. In 1653 DePoincy’s private possessions were granted to the Knights of Malta whose overlordship never really prospered. The French West India Co. bought St. Croix from the Knights of Malta in 1665. In 1674 the King of France paid off company debts and took possession. After the French Crown perennially lost money on St. Croix, Louis XIV ordered all inhabitants removed to St. Dominque(Haiti) at Christmas time,1695.

Farm animals left behind multiplied and became provisions for buccaneers. Some English families were squatters during the period of French abandonment and were on hand when the Danish West India and Guinea Company bought St. Croix from the French Crown in 1733. Denmark took over the island as a crown colony in 1755. The nine quarters and innumerable estates that mark off St. Croix geography date back to this period. There soon followed St. Croix’s golden age, the last half of the 18th. century when sugar and rum made St. Croix planters wealthy on the backs of slave labor. All that was soon to change.

In 1792 the Danish government declared the slave trade to be unlawful, but allowed a transition period until 1803 when the slave trade was completely abolished. The British occupation during the Napoleonic Wars, 1807-1815, was a slight economic reprieve during what was a downward spiraling sugar economy fueled by natural disasters, earthquake and tidal wave in 1872 and a severe hurricane in 1876, labor unrest, emancipation was declared in 1848 after riots began and Fireburn in1878, and a decade long depression following the latter coupled with the development of the sugar beet in Europe.

1878 was noteworthy also as the year the first great sugar central began operating on St. Croix. This Bethlehem Sugar Central eventually drove all the independent estate factories out of business, then itself closed in 1930 when its stockholders refused to put up new funds. Now a U. S. Territory, purchased from Denmark on March 31, 1917 mainly to keep it out of the hands of the Germans during World War I, prospects hadn’t changed as the Crucians had hoped. Prohibition added insult to injury for the rum industry. Another hurricane in 1928 presaged the Great Depression. Conditions gradually improved as Bethlehem reopened, and the New Deal came to St. Croix. Commercially grown sugar cane persisted until about 1960.