In the 1700s, sugar was the most important crop in the world. Sugar cane grows in warm, tropical climates and the Caribbean islands were the perfect places to grow it. European settlers from England, France, Spain, and Holland (now called the Netherlands) came to the region, cut down the islands’ forests, and planted sugar cane in hope of becoming rich. The valuable crop was used to make sugar, molasses, and rum. Any Caribbean island with farmable land was used to grow sugar cane.

St. Kitts was the oldest and wealthiest of the English colonies in the Caribbean. This 68-acre island had rich volcanic soil, a climate of sun and rain, and an endless supply of slaves. Annually it yielded a fortune in sugar and rum for its wealthy, mostly absentee, landholders. Around 1775, the time of the American Revolution, 68 sugar plantations existed on St. Kitts alone! The plantation owners sold their sugar products to American, British, French, and Dutch customers, and anyone else who wanted to buy them. By the end of the 19th century, however, all that was gone. Slavery had been abolished and Europe¹s beet sugar had pre-empted Caribbean cane. Depressed market prices could not offset the production and transportation costs for an island crop.

Today St. Kitts is the only Leeward Island, of the Caribbean, that still grows sugar cane. However, sugar cane is very expensive to grow, harvest, and process. The fields are now state owned and the entire island crop is processed in one government-run factory. The dozens of sugar plantations, which had dotted the island, climbing from the shore up into the mountains, were gradually abandoned. In time, the handsome stone structures -- complete factories- fell to wind, weather, and vandalism. Here and there on the island one can still see a signature smokestack rising a hundred feet into the sky, or the egg-shaped base of an old windmill.