Christiansted National Historic Site

Indigenous peoples

St. Croix’s first settlers came up the Lesser Antilles from South America. By 2,000 years ago there was a village at Salt River Bay on the north shore, and by 1300 it had the only ceremonial plaza and ball court so far found in the Lesser Antilles. On his second voyage, in 1493, Columbus named the island Santa Cruz and sent a boat ashore; it met Kalinago people (the brochure calls them Caribs) in a canoe, and the fight that followed, at what became known as the Cape of the Arrows, is considered the first armed resistance to European encroachment in the Americas. Over the next century the Spanish wiped out the island’s Kalinago population. The park’s museum holds what it calls a world-class archeological collection documenting St. Croix’s Amerindian cultures. [1] [3] [2]

Black history

In slavery’s shadow a distinct class of Free Blacks grew up on St. Croix. Some were freed for service; others bought their freedom with money earned as artisans or from produce sold at the Sunday Market. They worked as merchants, fishermen, seamen, tailors, coopers and blacksmiths, filled the fire brigade and served in the militia, and many of the anonymous masons and carpenters who built Christiansted’s neoclassical town were Free Blacks. As early as 1747 a section of town, Neger Gotted — later Free Gut — was set aside for them to build their own houses. Their number more than doubled between 1791 and 1815, from 775 to 1,764, but not until 1834 were they granted full equality with whites. [1]

Slavery

From settlement in 1734 until Denmark ended its slave trade — in 1803, by the park brochure’s dating — tens of thousands of Africans — the exact number is not known — were shipped to St. Croix. Survivors of the Middle Passage were auctioned at the Company’s compound — a warehouse complex built by enslaved Africans the Company owned, where, the Park Service says, people were sold in the courtyard until the 1750s. On the plantations they worked dawn to dark six days a week and around the clock at harvest, lived in masonry huts they built themselves in rows arranged for control, and kept African language, religion and foods alive. [1] [4]

Captured leaders of the 1733 uprising on St. John helped build the fort; in the early 1800s its prison held mostly enslaved plantation workers. Beside its doors, exposed ground marks the whipping post where enslaved people were publicly brutalized. The fort is now part of the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. [1] [3] [5]