Antigua Sugar Mills

Document Type

Digital Project

Publication Date

Summer 2016

Project Date Range

06/2016-Present

Abstract

The Sugar Mills Project involves researching, mapping, historicizing and narrativizing the sugar mills of Antigua. As part of a summer 2016 course in the Caribbean, Professor Carmen Gillespie, English, and a group of students began surveying the land on the island of Antigua with a keen eye toward the island’s history. The project focuses on the numerous sugar mills on the island, which total about 200 despite the limited space — about the same size as Union County. Several groups that have gone to the Caribbean have had the good fortune to meet Agnes Meeker, an independent historian, who has spent decades cataloging the location and histories of each of the mills on Antigua.

A group of Bucknell student engineers worked with the Griot Institute from 2017-18 to create a template for the end goal of this project, an interactive, web-based map of the island that includes each of its six parishes and every sugar mill that existed in its history. The interactive map will provide information about each mill, its ownership chronology and information about the enslaved peoples who worked there. Students are working with Meeker to add details and with Digital Scholarship to enhance the map.

Comments

A previous version of this project can be found on this website.

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