Historical Geography of St. Croix

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Cadastral index to the historical geography of St. Croix.

(Daniel Hopkins)

Begining in 1733, St. Croix was laid out into large rural lots of land, which, even before they were taken up and worked, were referred to as plantations, or plantager, in Danish. These numbered plots, most of them 2,000 by 3,000 Danish feet, or almost 150 English acres, were the basic units of the island's cadastral system, or record of land ownership and tax obligation. Censuses were organized on the basis of these lots for a century and a half. This section of our historical- geographical project is therefore constructed on the basis of these original administrative units: socio-economic data (as well as other information and images) will be organized and presented by plantation, just as in the original, unpublished Danish archival records, most of which are to be found in Copenhagen. Access to this information is obtained through the main index map above.

A mouse-click on any of the island's nine administrative quarters will carry the reader to the selected area of J. M. Beck's map of 1754, which most clearly depicts the original pattern of numbered plantation lots. A colored box will appear in plantation lots for which specific information is available: this information can be reached by selecting a plantation lot so marked. The original plantations were consolidated and subdivided considerably in the course of time (these new working properties came to be known as estates). Underlined dates lead to reproductions of the appropriate sections of a series of contemporary maps of developing patterns of ownership and land use, or to reconstructions from cadastral registers. The reader will be able to proceed further from these reconstructed quarter maps to transcripts of annual census information, which was arranged by quarter, and to diagrams of individual estates.

After a few generations of agricultural production, it was found expedient to maintain the record of property ownership and tax obligation in terms of the characteristically fanciful names of the estates. This practice was given graphic expression in P. L. Oxholm's great map of 1794 (published in 1799). After this, the original numbered lots began to lose some of their administrative significance. Oxholm's map will replace Beck's as our index map after the turn of the nineteenth century.

Information about the two towns and various other points of interest will in time also be accessible from this map.

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