BVI’s Legacy of Land Ownership
Historian and Director of Culture Dr Katherine Smith urged Virgin Islanders to remember that land ownership and agriculture were central to life in the territory long before emancipation. Speaking at an Emancipation Festival forum, she traced how enslaved and free Black people built villages, farms and an internal market that sustained the islands after plantation collapse.
Historian and Director of Culture Dr Katherine Smith is urging Virgin Islanders to reflect on a powerful but often overlooked part of the territory’s past: the deep roots of land ownership and agriculture among both free and enslaved people long before emancipation. Speaking at a forum connected to the annual Emancipation Festival, Dr Smith outlined the islands’ early history — from Indigenous presence to Columbus’s arrival in 1493 and English settlement in the late 1600s alongside enslaved Africans.
By the mid-18th century sugar plantations had become dominant, replacing cotton, but that era was cut short by a devastating hurricane in 1819. The storm destroyed many plantations and prompted planters to leave, leaving behind the people who would form the backbone of post-plantation society.
Dr Smith said that what followed was a defining chapter for the Virgin Islands. While plantation interests continued to drive an external economy, an internal market driven largely by free Black people and the enslaved population supplied daily life. She pointed to provision grounds cultivated by the enslaved — markets near what is now the Old Administration Building in Road Town supplied food that sustained the territory.
Citing historian Michael O’Neal, Dr Smith noted that Black residents in the Virgin Islands enjoyed land rights and property ownership earlier and more extensively than many of their Caribbean counterparts. Records reported to England by 1863 indicated that the majority of land was in the hands of ex-slaves.
By 1900, those former plantations had been transformed into villages and family farms that marked a period of self-sufficiency. That history stands in stark contrast to today’s BVI, which imports the vast majority of its food and operates local agriculture on a limited scale. Public health experts across the Caribbean have increasingly linked diets dominated by imported, processed foods to rising rates of diabetes, hypertension and some cancers, prompting renewed calls for improved food security and local production.
Dr Smith’s remarks were both celebratory and cautionary: land has long represented freedom, health and wealth for Virgin Islanders. Today, rising real estate values, the sale of ancestral lands and waning interest among younger generations in farming threaten that legacy. Her message to residents and policymakers was clear — preserving land access, reviving local agriculture and remembering this history should be priorities as the territory navigates modern economic and social pressures.
Primary source: BVI News