Mount Healthy Windmill
| Mount Healthy Windmill | |
|
British Virgin Islands | |
|---|---|
 Mount Healthy Windmill | |
| Type: | Windmill |
| Location | |
| Location: | 18°26’43"N, 64°38’26"W |
| History | |
| Built 18th century | |
| Windmill | |
| Information | |
| Condition: | Tower only remains |
Mount Healthy windmill is a ruined windmill on the north side of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. It is a Georgian mill, stone built from field rubble with thick walls that have endured centuries since it ceased to grind, and now stands as a monument within a public park.
Across the road from the windmill lie the ruins of the mill round, which was powered by beasts of burden, the factory with boiling house, the distiller, hospital and living quarters.
Mount Healthy Windmill is the last remaining windmill in the British Virgin Islands.
History
During the plantation era of the islands, the mill was part of a thriving estate of 250 acres, the Mount Healthy Estate, which covered the steep slopes on the north shore of Tortola, planted with sugarcane. The crop was farmed on the slopes and brought to the mill, where the cane was crushed, supplying the sugar mill and rum distillery in nearby Brewer's Bay.
One of the owners of the mill in its heyday was Balziel Hodge, son of the notorious Arthur William Hodge, a cruel man and understood to be the only British West Indian slave owner to be executed for murdering one of his own slaves.
Following the abolition of slavery in 1834, workers from the Mount Healthy estate could buy land to cultivate for themselves. However the sugar industry was in decline, and deteriorated after a series of disastrous hurricanes in the 1830s and drought in the 1850s. All these factors and the availability of alternative sources of sugar, caused the collapse of the sugar economy in the early nineteenth century. The mill was then abandoned and fell into ruin.
Park
Today the mill stands in ground set aside as a national park.
Pictures
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Outside links
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("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Mount Healthy Windmill) |
- Forts and Mills of the Eastern Caribbean – Organisation of East Caribbean States
References
- Isaac Dookhan, History of the British Virgin Islands' ISBN 0-85935-027-4
- Vernon Pickering, A Concise History of the British Virgin Islands' ISBN 0-934139-05-9