It was an ordinary day. Reading an email that was sent to me by a good friend, Barbara, who lives on the Caribbean Island of St. Martin/Sint Maarten. The beautiful Caribbean island is half-Dutch (Sint Maarten) and half-French (St. Martin). My wife and I have made many treks to the island for vacations and have met many wonderful people who call the island home. Barbara is one of those people. She grew up in Pennsylvania, but during a vacation with a friend to the island, met the love of her life and married. She has never wandered from the island since that time! And...why would one want to leave a perfect place? Barbara recently sent me a story telling of dry-side stone walls that can be found around her island. Seems these dry-side stone walls are not held together with cement. They are constructed in such a way that they support and hold the stones in place with balance and skilled techniques of stacking. This type of dry-pile stone wall is not unique to the Caribbean.
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| An Old Slave Wall |
They exist everywhere in the world where loose stones were found and used for construction. These dry pile stone walls are found across the island. Some reach the very top of the mountains, yet most are encircling historical sites such as historic plantations, as boundary markers. Other uses for these stone walls where as small structure supports, animal pens and other enclosed areas. The creation of boundary markers from these stone walls is primarily the result of clearing the fields of stones so that agriculture and animal husbandry would take place. Thus, all movable stones were cleared and moved to the boundary line and stacked, having then a triple function: clearing the fields; keeping animals in; and as boundary delineations. The popular name "Slave Walls" comes from the fact that these types of dry-pile stone walls were started on the island during the colonial period, with the skilled workers who built them being enslaved Africans. Enslaved Africans and their later descendants built the vast majority of the Slave Walls on the island. The majority of these stone walls were built after emancipation in 1863. The stone walls built before emancipation are the true Slave Walls, while those built after emancipation do not actually justify the name, as it was Free Persons of African descent who built them. Extremely poor European descendants from St. Barth's built them. These European descendants we called Chacha Balahoos and they were so poor that they would come to the island to build these dry-pile stone walls for pennies a day. We do not see many of the Chacha Balahoo walls remaining, but perhaps the best example is on the French-Dutch boundary wall at Cupecoy.  |
| Chacha Balahoo Wall |
The key structural differences between these two identical stone wall types is that the African descendants walls are wider and shorter with a more rounded top, having large stones on the exterior and smaller stones as a fill in the middle of the wall itself. By contrast, the European descendant walls are taller, narrower, with straighter sides, and a flattened top. The Chacha Balahoo stone walls do not have a middle fill of smaller stones, but rather consistent-sized stones throughout the wall. This second technique is a quicker building method and more easily constructed. It is hoped that on the island of Sint Maarten/St. Martin that the walls can be preserved and restored with the actual stone remains of those walls too badly damaged. With 160 years since the Dutch abolition of slavery, these distinctive iconic cultural features from slavery past, called Slave Walls, now need to find the proper respect and preservation they deserve. And, my wife and I need to make yet another visit to our favorite island to examine the walls that we had seen in the past, but had no idea of the historical significance they carried. I guess I am just lucky that I didn't run into one of those walls and knock it down while driving the winding roads on the island. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
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