The plantation ruins scattered across St. John today, the ones this park's trails walk through, all shut down before the island became American soil. Freedom came first. Statehood, of a kind, took seventy years longer.
A Governor's Proclamation, Read Aloud
On July 3, 1848, Governor-General Peter von Scholten read a proclamation freeing every enslaved person in the Danish West Indies, formally announced on St. Croix but applying island-wide, including St. John. NPS's own timeline for the park places this squarely as the hinge point of the island's modern history, the moment the labor system behind Annaberg and Cinnamon Bay's sugar estates lost its workforce.
What followed wasn't immediate collapse. It was a long, uneven decline. In 1867, a severe hurricane tore through St. John's infrastructure, and seven of the remaining twelve sugar plantations closed for good in its wake. Through the 1870s, more estates simply fell into disuse, roads went impassable, and the forest that today's hikers walk through began reclaiming fields that had been cleared for cane.
Plan Your Virgin Islands Visit
The plantation ruins along the Reef Bay Trail and at Annaberg trace directly back to this history. Build them into your trip.
Open the Trip PlannerFrom Bay Rum to the American Flag
By 1905, St. John's economy had shifted to cattle farming and bay-oil production, distilling bay leaves into the scented oil used in soaps, shampoos, and colognes, a modest trade compared to sugar's old scale but a real one. The United States purchased the Danish West Indies for twenty-five million dollars in gold in 1917, with the formal transfer ceremony held on St. John on April 15 of that year.
Tourism's roots on the island go back almost as far: a charcoal-production cooperative formed in 1931, and the Caneel Bay Resort opened in 1935, decades before Laurance Rockefeller's donation created the national park itself. The seventy years between the proclamation and the transfer weren't empty ones. They were the years that turned a sugar island into something else entirely, before it became American, and long before it became a park.
- Emancipation proclamation JULY 3, 1848
- Hurricane closes 7 estates 1867
- Economy shifts to bay oil 1905
- U.S. purchase completed 1917, $25 MILLION IN GOLD
The 1848 emancipation date, the 1867 hurricane and plantation closures, the 1905 economic shift, and the 1917 transfer date and price all checked against the National Park Service's own St. John history timeline for Virgin Islands National Park.
Walk the ruins at Annaberg or Cinnamon Bay today and it's easy to read them as one continuous story: slavery, then a park. The seventy years in between, the hurricane, the bay-rum trade, the slow reforesting of old cane fields, are the part that gets skipped. They're also the reason those ruins look the way they do now, abandoned well before any flag changed.