Western St. Thomas Duckworth ruins reopen debate on filming historic sites on private land

In Duckworth, western St. Thomas, a creator who researches old estates set out to document a little-publicised ruin linked to the Duckworth aqueduct and the former plantation named in archives though absent from an 1804 map, with documents dating the venture from 1810.

Desk research highlighted Charles White, a planter who reached Jamaica in 1807, traded from Kingston and later bought land in Duckworth. The same material records a rare petition to the Crown to adopt the surname Williams on the ground that he was already widely known that way locally; the grant reportedly left him styled Charles White Williams. The narrator reasoned that many hill estates opened in the 1800s turned to coffee as cane faded, and file notes list an aqueduct, water mill and race, labour housing, planter quarters and a great house.

On the ground the route passed largely empty dwellings before thick colonial stonework appeared: broad retaining walls, an aqueduct segment with arches set into bedrock, a spillway trace and a hollowed water-mill shell with a single obvious window opening. Terraced dry-stone banks suggested drying floors typical of coffee processing, while red-brick edging on masonry was likened, informally, to two other aqueduct examples at Montego Bay and Mona in St. Andrew.

After crossing the aqueduct line onto ground under active cultivation, the visitor stopped short of crossing a working farm without consent. A man who appeared to exercise control over the tract insisted the camera operator leave and declined discussion; the visitor, who said they grew up nearby and had filmed the ruin before, questioned how permission can be sought when no one is present, but acknowledged a landholder’s privacy and withdrew rather than risk confrontation. A separate passer-by suggested the stricter man now owns the ground, a claim the visitor could not verify.

Residents offered oral memory that coffee was washed along the channel, while the visitor maintained aqueducts chiefly conveyed water to the estate, allowing possible dual use. The party could not trace a clear river intake or dam in overgrown banks and did not reach the great-house footprint, citing access limits.

Extended narration in the same production added biographical detail: Charles White, born 1769 in England to schoolmaster Thomas White of Lambeth, was called in an 1805 will “Charles White of Kingston, Jamaica, merchant”; in 1808 he formalised the Williams surname and married in London a spouse named in the piece as Arat Chub, with several children noted. By 1810 he was listed as proprietor of Duckworth. He died 5 February 1832; after British slave emancipation in 1834 the estate’s proprietors reportedly claimed compensation for 284 enslaved people registered there, receiving more than five thousand pounds sterling. The voice-over also described eastern Jamaica estates mixing valley sugar with upland coffee, and observed that much of Duckworth has reverted to bush while foundations and the aqueduct remain visible markers of past labour and engineering.