they've stood the test of time and today ruins like these are our windows to the past on saint croix ruins can be found at almost every turn each with its own purpose and story attracting the curiosity of everyone who sees them but today's show will focus on building structures that are still intact and functional we'll learn of their historical significance here at saint croix and trace back their connection to the united states the first house up on our tour is stay cane garden tucked away at saint croix south shore the estate garden bay great house was built in 1748 during a time of great sugar prosperity on the island the house along with the more than 200 acre sugar plantation that surrounded it was originally owned by three generations of mcavoy scottish irish planners who lived on ireland during both the french and danish colonial period now like other great houses on saint croix the estee garden bay great house exhibits a neoclassical architectural style but what sets it apart for some is its condition and its connection to the nation's capital now i can't quite put my finger on it but there's something about this house that looks very familiar now to help us with this and give us a tour of this beautiful estate is bill taylor one of two architects that did restoration work on the house nice to meet you bill taylor nice to meet you so what's the start for today well we're at a really significant site which represents uh the architecture of its time and place and also the effort to restore it and it's an interesting story and it's one that's especially cruzan so i think this is this is going to be interesting for your viewers it's important to note that this house was destroyed by a fire in the early 1900s it stood in ruins for some 40 years until it was rebuilt in 1985 richard generous a collector of historical houses and artifacts bought the property and hired bill taylor and danish architect frederick jessing to restore the house to its historical origins in england during the 18th century there was a kind of intellectual eruption of thought that involved not just architecture but politics and religion and philosophy and science okay and neoclassical architecture especially palladianism which is a certain form of neoclassical architecture was thought to be the embodiment of those principles for various reasons now this building may look super fancy but but in fact it represented a kind of a simple neoclassical version that represented the high ideals of the time and even though we say this is palladianism and it really is an example of english or anglo-palladianism it was a style that not only found residents all throughout europe but as i'll point out later this had a tremendous impact on american colonial architecture and that influence and impact came from william thornton a one-time resident of the island who studied neoclassical architecture in europe and is a major link between this house and another famous national structure thornton he actually went on to the states in 1788 became a citizen and one architectural commission so he was completely well trained and versed in in neo palladium architecture he won a big commission in philadelphia in 92 and in 93 in 1793 he won the commission for the united states capital which was really the more important building of the two the capital in the white house but uh the building that we see now is still a reflection of the architect who lived here who was a doctor and had uh a botanical garden at grove place so thornton had a botanical garden here on saint croix in grove yes and he was here during the construction so the fact that there are these elements of sophistication these small differences and dimensions for instance and the fact that it's such a pure version of anglo-palotianism and the fact that he was a good friend and present uh it seems unmistakable that his hand was here so i think in a sense america can thank us for the capital and perhaps the white house right because the architect of the white house who also studied the same sources in england his name was james hoban he actually worked as a supervisor on the capitol building so thornton and hoband were connected so there's a real connection here and there's about a 10-year difference between the ages of those buildings and this i started all from here in the sense it did well it started in italy and then it went to england and then came here follow the trailer right follow the trade winds exactly well now that we've uncovered the connection this house has with the us capitol and white house let's take a tour of the inside and see what other interesting things they are to learn about this home the first room we enter is the receiving room now this room is quite larger than that of the original home but what's the same is the form and function it wouldn't screen to the rest of the home physically as a receiving room perhaps somebody would come here and leave a calling card and wait and then be brought into the main salon so socially it had a function but also it makes this a more complex architectural room and and here we see this a neoclassical detailing very rich and these uh tuscan columns which reflect the stone columns of the porch these are actually mahogany and the mahogany was typically painted except for the furniture of course and the doors so the fact that it's mahogany painted is not a problem for a preservationist because the wood is tropical and it's easy to shape and so that was the wood of choice we couldn't use pine or oak okay now you're talking about mahogany i've heard that you guys have one of the largest private collections here in this house well uh each room has some i don't know how it compares in size but of course the quality reflects mr john rat's keen eye and interest and so he has a team that searched out these elements and that's why it looks of a piece you know the building and the furnishings and the setting are really all all of one one of the things you can see from this room that you can't see from the salon is above the cornice which is a very deep and rich molded element you can see a space there you see that yeah they do that and there's also a space here janisha can you see that you could stand up on this chair i'm kidding you see it here yes i do see it it's kind of short here but right i do see it the idea of this is that these ceilings above are all connected and so the even with the windows closed warm air rises up passes through this ventilator and it goes out of the porch ceilings so with everything closed off it's still vented and for hurricanes of course you know the issue of generating pressures inside the house are eliminated by this device and this is the device that you see in the saint thomas synagogue same time the synagogue is vented all the time by this natural passive convection goes up and it goes out and you can see you can see it in this building in this room it goes all the way around the building so that's one of the reasons it's so comfortable in here without any air conditioning okay so where exactly are we standing right now i would probably call this the living room or my house but what is this well that's not quite grand enough yeah it's not so this is perhaps the salon or the main entertaining room and this is probably reflective of the way the original floor plan worked and you could see mr gen red has has hit home runs on these furnishings this beautiful brass chandelier it's very detailed in it yeah and it's perfectly in scale with the room so this would have been of the same period it didn't necessarily come from here because the room had a different character in the 40s but the end product we think is authentic as far as as as it could have been made without having actual interior photographs of this at the time before uh the work was done you know we get the quality of construction that's equal to the original work you know the original work was done by freeman who had become tradesmen the building itself represents not just this european influence in theory but the workmanship was done by people from here who were trained and in many cases bought their freedom through their talents so the building itself represents a kind of a symbol of emancipation to me because these these were local fellows and they took some of these elements and they put them in their own modest cottages and you could see some of these if you look around saint croix well here we have the sumptuous dining room and you can see it's in scale with the rest of the house it's a large and grand room and this is probably the size of the original dining room it had a stair introduced into the corner of the room in the 40s in the reconstruction which sort of took away about a third of the space of the room but we knew it wasn't original so we took that out but here we have a magnificent display of period furniture we have cruzan wicker furniture here mahogany and some of the pieces i think mr generat acquired from the walls when they sold the property i believe this silver mirror is part of that legacy and it's you can see it's beautiful piece the crystal chandeliers were a reflection of increased prosperity so we think of chandeliers as typically brass and some of the churches have those but as the estates became more prosperous the crystal was a kind of reflection let's say a status symbol adjacent to the grand dining room is the kitchen it's not as elegant as the other rooms but it's quite charming it was once the pantry now it's a fully functional kitchen decorated with stone and marble finishings and accentuated with windows that go all the way down to the floor now if you're wondering about the windows they keep the kitchen cool by allowing the heat to escape faster and like the north front side of the home the backs out porch area is just as charming and attractive with its columns stone floor and arches it's a true work of palladian architecture downstairs here would have had uh cisterns and storage rooms and maybe servants quarters maybe guest rooms initially and so we turn this into a more comfortable guest area and as you can see we have marble floors and this kind of checkerboard pattern is something that you see in chris instead sometimes with gray and white stones but black and white is kind of fancy so and so now it's pretty comfortable and with all this cross ventilation it's it's very nice in fact one of the keys to the stair was that we saw this event it wasn't open but we could see the outline of this sloped wall vent so there was some indication that that wouldn't have been a vent into a closet that brings a lot of it brings a lot of air doesn't it yeah it does well it's closed right now and this serves as a hall for the downstairs and they're separate entrances guests don't have to go through the main floor they can just exit out into little garden areas and maintain a little bit of privacy but again it's beautifully furnished and again this is more sumptuous than the downstairs would have been as a kind of utilitarian space but it's very comfortable thank you well it's a part of saint croix and thank you channel 12 for your interest and in a sense this is the landscape here it's it's one slice but it's really important and in a sense it belongs to everybody so thank you for your interest and thanks for coming thank you it's so hard for me to pull away from this beautiful house but there are more historic sites to see on this house tour so let's keep it moving from this beautiful estate cane garden bay house we travel west to estate butler bay another well-preserved historic estate like the king garden estate this butler-bay site was also a sugar cane plantation to show us around is mike hartlech a caretaker for a section of the estate from what i know so far i've been here about three and a half years on the property itself currently it's divided into two different owners on this side on the south side of the road it's owned by a company from the bahamas named twin pine international holdings and it's roughly 10 acres and it consists of this house which is we call the baobab house because of the baobab tree that sits in front of it this was originally a caretaker's house for the butler bay plantation to the west is the sugar factory which we'll see later and to the south of us is the old sugar mill that used to power or used to grind the cane and at one point is its largest i believe it was 360 acres is one of the larger estates on the island across the street is the the butler bay plantation as it's called now it's the property it's 14 acres i believe it's owned by a man named gary latin lawler mr mr lawler's a fantastic gentleman that's painstakingly restored all of the buildings over there it's the original great house the original cookhouse one of the carriage houses the overseer's house the hospital uh three or four of the slave ruins it's it's beautiful now that mike gave us an overview of this date let's get a closer look at the different structures well it's my understanding that back in 1760 when the house was built that the great house was still under construction um apparently in 1747 the property became independently owned this house is was originally used kind of as a manager's house during all of those times there's a an old slave building behind it at one point was a it's been used for many different things but it was a cook house it was a slave house it was a little bit of everything there's another portion on the house which has since been converted into a bedroom that was a almost like an outdoor dining facility it had four stone posts and a roof over it where everybody all the the workers would gather during the day to eat the meal inside the house mainly it was used as the managers or overseers or caretakers depending on you know what stage of development the plantation was in but like right here i'm told that this is where a water pump used to stand a hand crank pump from a cistern and this used to be where the blacksmith would work before it became a cistern for the house later so it's got many different uses all i know is it was here in 1760 it's still here it's still square i live in it and love it near the baobab house are the ruins of the rum and sugar factories this is the combination sugar factory and rum distillery it's one of the fewest states on the island i'm told it had both some had one or the other but very few of them had both of them in under the same roof this is a t-shaped building if you could look down on it from above and the portion that you can see here is where they did the rum distillery there were three stills in there at one point two three hundred gallon stills and a one 250 gallon still and then there was a second floor and that's where a lot of storage took place and the different tools of the trade that you needed to keep dry from what i know is behind us is the sugar mill the cane would come in raw it would be the the power generated by the turbine spinning through the wind would crush the cane the sloosh run would come from the from the mill down into the factory and the sluice being the juices that were squeezed out of the cane okay now as that came into the into the factory it went through a series of distillations where they were it was put into giant coppers and then boiled and at each stage from each copper as it transferred to the next it was at a different processing point or a different level of purity the the final stage being the actual white raw sugar there's something i believe it's called portet or portite that's the stage right between molasses and sugar that is how most of it was exported back to the to back to denmark and this is a sugar mill it's now more of a centerpiece for a guest house this picture shows what the area looked like in the early 1900s adjacent to the sugar factory is the second butler bay property it's currently owned by mr gary lawler and consists of what was once an overseer's dwelling slave quarters stables and a great house this is the great house this is where everything you know was was run from this was where the owners lived and as on the bottom floor you'll see the stables the horses were kept then up above that there's a living room a dining room a bedroom a bathroom and there's a separate building over with that's got more bedrooms in it and then off to the right again is the original kitchen but this house has been painstakingly restored it's absolutely beautiful and it's one of the things that i think makes butler bay so special in itself is the fact that this is like walking back in time you've got the ruins showing everything you've got you know the plantation pretty much the way that it was back in the day it's it's very uh typical of the early designs and construction methods used it's very unusual in the fact that it's still pretty much the way that it was the current owner's gone to great length to make sure that that happened even in the dining room there's a a candled chandelier instead of an electrical chandelier even the horses and the number of horses on the property are authentic and too historic accuracy they are the closest breed to the pacifica horses which the plantation owner had at the time unfortunately due to privacy concerns we were not able to film inside the great house but as you can see from the outside it was and still is an amazing piece of architecture okay back hundreds of years ago where would we be right now we're in the middle of the provisional field um it's my understanding that generally the elevations below the sugar mill were used for provisional planting that way the the cane didn't have to be carted up the hill everything was brought down to the mills everything below it like where we're standing now is where they used to grow the food to feed the plantation workers now what's this building behind that we see behind you the two-story one you see back here that's the old overseers uh house and below it i think they used as supplies as stables hurricane protection jail a little bit of everything and then you'll notice off to the right there there's an old slave ruin the slave portion at one point there were around 30 of those from there to the existing road in the end of the driveway and they call that the village now surrounding the great house and sugar factory area are other interesting structures take for example this ruin at the westernmost point of the property at first glance it simply appears to be a ruin covered in overgrown brush and vines but it is said to have once housed one of the more famous and significant u.s poets this what's you see the building back there in the back at one point that was like i said it's been many different things but one thing i know for sure is in 1776 the poet that i was speaking about earlier phillip fernell lived here and he wrote while living here he wrote the beauties of santa cruz and four or five other poems at the same time he's writing poems about the revolutionary war back in the states in fact fornoa is credited by thomas jefferson one of the nation's founding fathers for quote saving the constitution of the united states other interesting structures are this limestone kiln and this water trough for animals which is hidden by overgrown brush here is an old watering trough that's kind of formal in my opinion but it looks really good now they would bring the animals up here to water and then they would draw the water from a well down here you can see it's still kind of interesting to me because there's steps leading down into the well to make it easier to get the water out to put in the troughs for the animals and i've got a picture of how it looked in the in the late 1800s that i'll make sure that you see and this is the picture it's no secret that this island is rich in history but what does remain a secret at times are the stories that come from places like estate king garden bay and the butler bay estate thanks to mr generate lawler bill taylor and mike hartlege for their time and generosity and until next time remember to cherish your home this beautiful island but most of all cherish each other you