Little Bay Cattle Mill

Overview

The Little Bay Plantation site is the core area of what was once an extensive plantation extending well beyond the current boundaries of the site. Currently owned by the Montserrat National Trust, Little Bay Plantation is preserved as a park within an area being developed as the new capital for Montserrat.  Massive construction projects have been undertaken on three sides of the site; to the east and north there are new roads, to the west, a huge cricket pitch, and directly adjacent to the northern edge of the site, a new national museum.  The museum houses the offices and collections of the Montserrat National Trust, which has sponsored several seasons of archaeological investigation at the Little Bay Plantation site.

Archaeological excavations were conducted at Little Bay Plantation between 2005 and 2007 and again between 2010 and 2014. Excavation data provided through the DAACS website only features work conducted by Dr. Mary Beaudry, Dr. Lydia Pulsipher, Dr. Mac Goodwin, and Dr. Barbara Heath between March 2006 and March 2007.

Documentary Evidence

Robert Piper obtained the title to a parcel of land known as Carr’s Little Bay Plantation near the northern tip of Montserrat sometime between 1710 and 1712 and renamed it Little Bay Plantation. Robert Piper was described in a 1729 census as a “Planter and Cooper” with a house and plantation, a household of nine members, and owner of 39 enslaved men, women, and children. His real estate included a cattle mill and three houses—a boiling house and still, a curing house, and a dwelling house—and 100 acres of land with thirty-six acres planted in cane and four in cotton. The nine people in Piper’s household included Robert and his wife Jane, their sons Christopher, Robert, Jr., William, and John and daughters Elizabeth and Sarah, and a “White Man Servant.”

In his will, written about a year before his death in 1740, Robert Piper left all of his real estate to his four sons and their lawful heirs, but the sons soon divided the property among themselves.  William and John, the younger sons, retained the Little Bay Plantation.  William died in 1762 without heirs, leaving the plantation to his brother John, who survived him for five years before his own death; also childless, John willed the plantation to his nephew Robert Piper.  In the ensuing years two Piper cousins, Hugh Allen Piper and John Hugh Allen, contested ownership of the property.  It is unclear who among these three was living on the plantation when the planter’s dwelling house burned to the ground in 1783.  The plantation was abandoned after the fire and never reoccupied, although in the 19th and 20th centuries the area was planted in cotton and sometime in the 19th century stones and bricks from the 18th-century plantation structures were robbed and reused in the construction of a cotton warehouse just northeast of the former sugar works.

Excavation history, methods, and prodcedures

In January 2006, excavators and volunteers cleared vegetation to expose the masonry ruins of the Cattle Mill. Several noteworthy architectural features were revealed, including a masonry sluice that pierced the mill wall to the southwest, facilitating the flow of cane juice to the boiling house. This sluice would have been the conduit for expressed sugar cane juice that flowed from the mill to the adjacent boiling house where it was cooked down into crystalline sugar. A large, masonry arch defined the entrance to the mill.  As the arch was only approximately 2.5 above modern grade, a single test unit was excavated under the arch to determine sedimentation rates at the site (Pulsipher 2006).

The single 1-x-1 meter unit was excavated under the arch.  Unfortunately, no field records from this excavation survive.  However, a report written by Lydia Pulsipher in 2006, provides some idea of what the team discovered.  Pulsipher notes that excavations indicated that sediment deposited by erosion had filled in the area around the south side of the Cattle Mill in the vicinity of the archway to a depth of at least six feet, and probably more (2006).  Excavations were stopped prior to subsoil.

A second .5- x -2 meter trench oriented north/south across the northern portion of the trackway, was opened by  Mac Goodwin. The excavation consisted of removal of topsoil to expose the trackway.  No notes were taken and artifacts could not be located for this unit (Beaudry, pers. communication, 2015).

Summary of research and analysis

Analysis of the artifacts from the 1-x-1 meter Cattle Mill test unit was conducted by DAACS staff at the DAACS laboratory at Monticello.

Two preliminary reports and one conference paper has been complete on the 2006-2007 fieldwork conducted by Little Bay Project (Beaudry and Pulsipher 2007; Beaudry, Pulsipher and Goodwin 2007; Pulsipher 2006).

Due to the exceptionally small sample size from the single unit at the Little Bay Cattle Mill (all ceramics n=43, datable ceramics n=35) , DAACS was unable to produce seriation-based chronology for the site. However, the 1831 Mean Ceramic Date for for the Cattle Mill, suggests that sedimentation of the Cattle Mill entrance occurred throughout the early-to-mid nineteenth century.  This accords with the documentary record indicating the sugar operation was abandoned after the fire of 1783.