Sugar production in colonial times was an arduous and labor intensive activity; especially on St. John with its dry climate, rocky soil and steep hillsides. Nonetheless sugar was a profitable commodity and the industry, fueled by slave labor, dominated St. John’s economy until the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The virgin landscape was slashed and burned changing the ecology of the island forever. The cleared hillsides were then terraced using the native stone as retaining walls. Holes were dug and sugar cane slips were planted. Water was painstakingly hauled from cisterns located at the sugar factory to the cane fields either by donkey cart or by hand.

At harvest time slaves worked 18-20 hours a day. The cane was cut, loaded into donkey carts and taken to the horsemill for crushing.

Four slaves were needed to run the horsemill. One drove the animals, two worked the rollers, feeding the stalks back and forth, and a fourth man took away the leftover sugar cane pulp called bagasse.

Some plantations used windmills to crush the sugar cane. On St. John only six plantations; Annaberg, Carolina, Denis Bay, Susannaberg, Caneel Bay and Catherinberg used the windmill which was far more efficient and faster than the horsemill. The remains of these windmills can still be seen at these estates.

It took about ten slaves to work the windmill. As in the horsemill two slaves fed the bundles of sugar cane back and forth through the cane crushing rollers.

st john usvi history: windmill The windmill turned the rollers more rapidly than the horsemill and was more dangerous. An ax was kept nearby in case one of the slaves got his hand caught in the rollers. If nearby workers acted fast enough, his arm would be chopped off before the rollers crushed his whole body.

The juice produced by the crushed cane flowed down a trough to the boiling house. Here it was fed into the first of five copper pots and boiled. Dried bagasse was used as fuel for the fire which burned underneath the copper pots. The fires were stoked and controlled from outside the boiling house.

As the juice boiled it thickened and when the consistency was just right, the juice was transferred to the neighboring pot. Impurities were skimmed off the top, and the boiling process was begun again. This was done pot after pot until a brown sugar called muscavado was produced.

The workers in the boiling room had to be highly skilled. A mistake in timing would end up in the production of molasses which was not nearly as valuable as crystal sugar.

The muscavado was then cooled and dried. The finished product was loaded into large wooden barrels called hogsheads containing about 1,000 lbs. of sugar each. The hogsheads were transported to the beach where specially constructed small boats, called dories, were used to bring the large barrels to seagoing ships bound for the markets of Europe.

Sugar production on St. John reached its zenith around 1800 but then began to decline. Sugar extracts a great deal of nutrients from the earth, and as there was no crop rotation or fertilization programs, the soil became depleted and crop yields fell. In addition to this, increased competition from other cane growing areas, the introduction of the sugar beet as an alternative to sugar cane in 1797, the emancipation of the slaves in 1848 and the hurricane and subsequent earthquake of 1867 put even further pressure on the industry. By the beginning of the twentieth century sugar had ceased to be an important crop on St. John.