Spooner's Estate is a historical cotton and

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 ...

site on Saint Kitts island of Saint Kitts and Nevis, in the

Lesser Antilles The Lesser Antilles ( es, link=no, Antillas Menores; french: link=no, Petites Antilles; pap, Antias Menor; nl, Kleine Antillen) are a group of islands in the Caribbean Sea. Most of them are part of a long, partially volcanic island arc betwe ...

of the

Caribbean The Caribbean (, ) ( es, El Caribe; french: la Caraïbe; ht, Karayib; nl, De Caraïben) is a region of the Americas that consists of the Caribbean Sea, its islands (some surrounded by the Caribbean Sea and some bordering both the Caribbean Se ...

. Its site is located near the southern entrance to the town of Cayon in

Saint Mary Cayon Parish Saint Mary Cayon is one of 14 administrative parishes that make up Saint Kitts and Nevis. It is located on the main island of Saint Kitts and the parish capital is Cayon. Land The parish's offer forest-draped mountains in the northern interior, ...

. The estate is noted as being one of the finest examples of agro-industrial history on Saint Kitts, and contains the only surviving

cotton gin A cotton gin—meaning "cotton engine"—is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation.. Reprinted by McGraw-Hill, New York and London, 1926 (); a ...

nery on the island.

History

The estate began as an animal-driven sugar mill estate possible around the late 17th century. Benjamin Buck Greene, deputy governor of the

Bank of England The Bank of England is the central bank of the United Kingdom and the model on which most modern central banks have been based. Established in 1694 to act as the English Government's banker, and still one of the bankers for the Government of ...

converted the estate to steam-powered milling in the 1870's. Around 1900, its ownership changed hands to Sendall and Wade. The new owners made history in the Caribbean, as in 1901, they installed the first cotton ginnery on St. Kitts and made Spooner's Estate one of the Caribbean's first to successfully convert from the

sugar cane industry Sugarcane or sugar cane is a species of (often hybrid) tall, perennial grass (in the genus ''Saccharum'', tribe Andropogoneae) that is used for sugar production. The plants are 2–6 m (6–20 ft) tall with stout, jointed, fibrous stalks t ...

to cotton production. The estate's remains on the site today include the structures and ruins of agro-industrial technology from the 17th, 19th and 20th centuries. They represent three major periods of agricultural history in Saint Kitts and Nevis. No official restoration project or park designation of the Spooner's Estate area has occurred to date.

References

{{coord, 17.347566, -62.737126, display=title, region:KN_type:landmark, name=Spooner's Estate History of British Saint Christopher and Nevis Saint Kitts (island) Residential buildings in Saint Kitts and Nevis Cotton gin Economy of Saint Kitts and Nevis Sugar plantations in the Caribbean

History

See also

References