Spooners Ginnery

Description

East of the town of Cayon is Spooner's Estate, rich in agro-industrial history spanning both the sugar and cotton periods. The site affords fine views of the surrounding countryside and contains the only surviving cotton ginnery on the island. Little archival evidence of the estates early history has survived to this day. However, a map drawn in 1753 identifies Spooner's Estate by name and indicate an animal driven sugar mill in operation. Later records show that Benjamin Buck Greene converted the estate to steam-powered milling in the 1870's. It was around 1900 that the estate changed hands and the new ones were among the first in the Caribbean to successfully convert from sugar to cotton. In 1901 they installed the first ginnery on St.Kitts, which continued to operate until the 1970's when the Government of St.Kitts and Nevis acquired the property. What remains today is the structure and ruins from the eighteenth c, nineteenth and twentieth century's representing three major periods in the agro-industrial history of St.Kitts and Nevis.

Features