Estate Butler's Bay, on the island of

Saint Croix Saint Croix; nl, Sint-Kruis; french: link=no, Sainte-Croix; Danish and no, Sankt Croix, Taino: ''Ay Ay'' ( ) is an island in the Caribbean Sea, and a county and constituent district of the United States Virgin Islands (USVI), an unincorpo ...

in the

U.S. Virgin Islands The United States Virgin Islands,. Also called the ''American Virgin Islands'' and the ''U.S. Virgin Islands''. officially the Virgin Islands of the United States, are a group of Caribbean islands and an unincorporated and organized territory ...

, was established as a

sugar plantation A plantation is an agricultural estate, generally centered on a plantation house, meant for farming that specializes in cash crops, usually mainly planted with a single crop, with perhaps ancillary areas for vegetables for eating and so on. The ...

by 1764. It was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

in 1978. The listing included five

contributing buildings In the law regulating historic districts in the United States, a contributing property or contributing resource is any building, object, or structure which adds to the historical integrity or architectural qualities that make the historic distric ...

, a

contributing structure In the law regulating historic districts in the United States, a contributing property or contributing resource is any building, object, or structure which adds to the historical integrity or architectural qualities that make the historic distric ...

, and five contributing sites.

Background

It is located on the west coast of the island, about north of

Frederiksted Frederiksted is both the town and one of the two administrative districts of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. It is a grid-planned city, designed by surveyor Jens Beckfor, originally to 14x14 blocks but built 7x7 to enhance the island commerce in ...

. It has also been known as Bottler's Bay. Surviving are "two great houses, three slave quarter buildings, a cookhouse, a sugar factory, stables, an overseer's house and a number of accessory structures." A wind-powered mill to crush sugar cane has been modified and incorporated into a modern house, and is not part of the listing. More than 80 slaves worked on the plantation. The earliest of the two great houses is a two-story building, in plan, with six bays by seven bays. It has a corrugated tin

hipped roof A hip roof, hip-roof or hipped roof, is a type of roof where all sides slope downwards to the walls, usually with a fairly gentle slope (although a tented roof by definition is a hipped roof with steeply pitched slopes rising to a peak). Thus, ...

which replaced the similar roof lost in an 1828 hurricane. With

References

Sugar plantations Plantations in the Danish West Indies National Register of Historic Places in the United States Virgin Islands Buildings and structures completed in 1764 {{VirginIslands-NRHP-stub