Boston Plantation ruins revisited in Fontill, St. Thomas

Explorers returned to Fontill in St. Thomas to finish surveying the Boston Plantation sugar works after an earlier visit ended at dusk with incomplete footage. The site sits beyond the Palmetto River area, where old maps once marked Palmetto River Plantations; today only the river at the bottom of the valley keeps that name.

Boston Estate was linked in early records to Thomas Bernard, who was granted permanent tenancy at Colbeck Castle in St. Catherine around 1626 and held it for about two years. By 1628 he was listed as owner of Boston together with Buckingham Plantation. By the early eighteenth century Boston and neighbouring Buckingham were jointly held by the Honourable Thomas Bernard and Giles Diston. Bernard ranked among the island’s wealthiest resident planters, with interests also at Colbeck Estate in the former parish of St. Dorothy, now St. Catherine.

When Bernard died in 1728, his will left £5,000 to his daughter Susanna upon her coming of age or marriage. A share of Boston and Buckingham, and much of his other Jamaican property, passed to his son William Henry Bernard. The will specifically kept Colbeck and the enslaved people there within the Bernard bloodline, excluding them from part of the inheritance. An inventory after his death recorded 360 enslaved people, more than 100 of them children, valued at over £9,000—his single largest asset. Sugar cane crushed at the mills, juice boiled in copper kettles into raw sugar for export, and molasses distilled into rum; every stage depended on forced African labour.

On the ground, pink cloth markers still flag ruin locations. The party, which included the host’s father and younger brother, found stone walls not seen on the earlier trip, the interior of a water mill with surviving pillars, a dam channel that once fed another mill downhill, and what appeared to be a cattle mill with a single opening and no clear entrance. The works stretch deep into bush on a large footprint. Local resident Mr. Crook Shank, identified as a pastor from New Mon Church, directed them toward the old slave-era structures.

St. Thomas was under drought at the time of the visit, yet vegetation along the route remained green and mangoes hung ripe in mid-season. Palmetto River great-house ruins stand on nearby hills but were not re-entered. Nightfall arrived before the group could reach Buckingham, where a smaller water wheel near a stream is still expected; those remains were left for a later outing. Nature has reclaimed much of Boston: boiling houses stand silent, the great house is gone, and only stone fragments mark an industrial sugar operation built on enslaved labour centuries ago.