ANNABERG HISTORIC TRAIL -

SLAVE QUARTERS - One of 16 cabins found in the area. With a lime concrete floor and a door in one end, each cabin housed a slave family or served as bachelor quarters. Posts were set in masonry walls and branches were woven to form the wattle, then daubed with a lime and mud mixture. The roof was probably thatched with palm leaves from the treyer palm.

THE VILLAGE - On the slope below this wall lie the ruins of the slaves' main village site. The women did some of their cooking at a small oven within the village. Slaves grew some fruits and vegetables here including cassava, yams, plantains, sweet potatoes, bananas, papayas, pineapples, breadfruit, etc.

Where did the owners and overseers live? The nearest known ruins of a Great House are near Frederiksdal half a mile away. Possibly the overseers lived there or at the Mary Point Estate. Absentee owners also operated many plantations on which no Great House was built.

Magas or Bagasse was the crushed stock of sugar cane. The stocks were dried and stored in sheds to be used as fuel. These stone columns are all that remain of the shed at Annaberg.

Imagine all the slopes above you covered with cane. With a short handled knife, the slaves cut the cane, stripped the leaves, and tied the stocks into bundles. Then, loading 2 or 3 bundles on a mule or a cart, they hauled it to Annaberg for processing.

The National Park Service has stabilized the Annaberg factory ruins to prevent excessive weathering. For your own safety, PLEASE DO NOT CLIMB ON THE RUINS as loose materials are still present.

WINDMILL - If a steady wind blew, the cane came to the windmill to be crushed. Revolving sails turned a central shaft which rotated the rollers crushing the stocks. Juice then ran down the rollers to the gutter and flowed by gravity to the factory.
The windmill at Annaberg, built sometime after 1844, was among the largest in the islands. Thirty-four feet in diameter at the base and twenty feet at the top, it is thirty-eight feet high.
The wooden structure carried the axle and sails and could be turned into the wind. The long slits in the stone wall made it possible to remove the sails or blades for repair. The built-in fireplace has no known function, but perhaps was used to heat water for washing the rollers. Rollers had to be washed when ever the mill stood idle; otherwise the juices soured.
(Before going on to Marker 6, walk to the wall beside the Frangipani tree and look across Leinster Bay to Great Thatch Island, the cay to your left which is the nearest British Virgin Island. It is believed some slaves attempted to swim from Annaberg to Great Thatch in order to reach freedom. Slaves were freed in the British Islands in 1834, but emancipation did not come to the Danish Islands until 1848.)
Windmills were not unusual in the Virgin Islands. Some 140 ruins are on St. Croix alone. St. John, being more mountainous and less productive, had only five which were located at Annaberg, Denis Bay, Susannaberg, Cathrineberg and Carolina. Although windmills required greater capital outlay, they produced more juice in a shorter time and were cheaper to operate (less manpower and no animals.) But the wind was not always dependable.