Plantation Laborer Housing at the Bethlehem Sugar Factory, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "“Folkeliv” and Black Folks’ Lives: Archaeology, History, and Contemporary Black Atlantic Communities", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Sugar was manufactured at Estate Lower Bethlehem Old Works plantation from the mid-eighteenth century, soon after the Danish colony of St. Croix was founded, until the Central Factory closed in 1966. Throughout this period, plantation laborer housing was situated north of the factory. By the twentieth century Bethlehem had become a Central Factory, first under Danish ownership until the United States federal government assumed control in 1934, having purchased the Virgin Islands in 1917. Bethlehem’s workers were housed in locations scattered around central St. Croix, determined by the origin or role of the various field laborers, specialists, and managers. Multiple forms of evidence including archaeology, oral history, and documents reveal the daily lives of the laborers who inhabited this plantation, suggesting ways that they built a community and gave meaning to these spaces, as the Crucian sugar industry gradually exited the global sugar economy.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• “Folkeliv” and Black Folks’ Lives: Archaeology, History, and Contemporary Black Atlantic Communities   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow