Make Tacarigua a better place

By Selwyn R. Cudjoe, Ph.D.
June 16, 2024

I am always curious about things, whether it is government officials or others, who do not understand the history of the place or area where they live and work, but are happy to destroy a healthy community, without realizing the harm they may be doing to the place and the people who live there.

Desell Josiah Austin, chairman of the Tunapuna/Piarco Regional Corporation, may be a well-meaning young man, but he can cause harm if he doesn’t understand the community he lives in. He really needs to know more about the history of Takarigua, the Orange Prairie and the origins of Tunapuna.

As Austin would have known, Tacarigua is one of the oldest villages in Trinidad. It was first mentioned around 1645, when it was listed as one of the four land grants under the guardianship of the island. In fact, the district of Tacarigua included Tunapuna, St. Joseph, and many surrounding areas.

In 1995, when we celebrated the 346th anniversary of the village, I wrote a booklet titled Tacarigua: A Village in Trinidad, documenting the history of Tacarigua.

In 1825, Alison Carmichael, a “member of the upper crust of Scottish society in the Caribbean,” described the grandeur of William Hardin Burnley’s house in her book Domestic Manners and Social Condition among the Whites, Coloureds and Negroes in the West Indies, where she had just moved to the village of Laurel Hill near Tacarigua. Another European, William Milne-Home, later lived in Laurel Hill, which he renamed Five Rivers.

“One of our closest neighbours was the Honourable William Burnley, who lived in Orangery, and I was struck by the beauty of the place. Although I do not think the natural beauty of the place can be compared with Mount Laurel, to this day I am still amazed at how the black labourers made the place so neat and tidy,” she said.

The house is situated in a park, embellished with fine natural woods, and dotted with many finer-looking sheep than are usually seen in the West Indies… The Orangery, however, is a very charming spot, and a very pleasant place to visit.

This is the mansion I saw when I was a kid in Tacarigua, and the lawn where we played football and cricket. The mansion was built in 1822, made of tapia (a type of earth mixed with mud, leaves and local wood), and surrounded by tall palm trees. Next to the mansion is a natural pond filled with beautiful water lilies.

There were eight or ten samanas on either side of the road leading to his house from East Main Road (then called Royal Road). The only one remaining is located east of St. Mary’s Anglican Church. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Trinidadian newspapers recorded Trinidadians from all over the island picnicking in the orange grove.

The mansion is comparable in grandeur (if not in elegance) to Drax Hall in Barbados, one of only three Jacobean mansions in the Western Hemisphere. It was built in 1654. Sean Carrington describes the grand building: “The house is a typical Jacobean building, with steep gables and other spires carved in stone, an unusually fine Jacobean staircase and an ornate hall arch carved in frankincense wood.” (Barbados Heritage AZ.)

The biggest difference between Burnley’s mansion and Drax Hall is that the latter is still standing, while Burnley’s mansion was demolished in the 1960s.

Tunapuna did not appear until the early 19th century. The 1813 Trinidad Slave Register records Tunapuna as follows: “TUNA PUNA (two words). Tuna puna plantation is a food plantation owned by Antonia Delaone, owner of the plantation, in the St. Joseph district. The Delaone family is the owner of the plantation. The Delaone family lives on the plantation (Maria, black, laborer, 22 years old, African; Manuel son, 21 years old; Francisco, 55 years old, African Mandingo; 3 slaves).”

Simon Schama writes in Landscape and Memory: “Landscape is first culture and then nature; a construction projected by the imagination onto wood, water, and rock.”

He warns: ‘Once a certain idea, myth or vision of landscape is established in an actual place, it confuses categories in a special way, making the landscape more real than the referent, in fact part of the scene.’ Land allotors in Tacarigua need to be aware of this danger.

I don’t completely agree with Austin’s pragmatism and youthful enthusiasm. I just hope he can understand that to build communities, which are the cornerstone of any development, we must understand the communities and work with them to make them better.