Rock Hall Museum: a LI Sugar Shack built by the backs of enslaved Africans...
- Thomas Tittmann
- Jun 19
- 6 min read
...On May 21, I visited Lawrence's Rock Hall Museum with fellow members of our West Hempstead Historical Society.
On returning home, I wanted to learn more about the history of this former mansion-turned-museum. So, join me...As we learn how the family wealth came from the sugar crop harvested by black slaves...who were themselves "harvested" from their homelands...
BUT, before we leave our homes or countries and see the harmful social costs of the way sugar's been produced, let's stay here in the US of A and take a look at the harmful environmental impact of sugar growing...
Here's a story about a mill in the Louisiana town Mary sings about: Thibodaux.
ROCK HALL - ON THE SURFACE...A MUSEUM
Why did this chicken cross the road...?
...didn't want to end up as this sweet treat...
My photos from our trip...
DIGGING DEEPER at Rock Hall...
DIGGING DEEPER: SUGAR: THE "WHITE GOLD" THAT FUELED SLAVERY
None of this — the extraordinary mass commodification of sugar, its economic might and outsize impact on the American diet and health — was in any way foreordained, or even predictable, when Christopher Columbus made his second voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1493, bringing sugar-cane stalks with him from the Spanish Canary Islands. In Europe at that time, refined sugar was a luxury product, the backbreaking toil and dangerous labor required in its manufacture an insuperable barrier to production in anything approaching bulk. It seems reasonable to imagine that it might have remained so if it weren’t for the establishment of an enormous market in enslaved laborers who had no way to opt out of the treacherous work.
For thousands of years, cane was a heavy and unwieldy crop that had to be cut by hand and immediately ground to release the juice inside, lest it spoil within a day or two. Even before harvest time, rows had to be dug, stalks planted and plentiful wood chopped as fuel for boiling the liquid and reducing it to crystals and molasses. From the earliest traces of cane domestication on the Pacific island of New Guinea 10,000 years ago to its island-hopping advance to ancient India in 350 B.C., sugar was locally consumed and very labor-intensive. It remained little more than an exotic spice, medicinal glaze or sweetener for elite palates.
It was the introduction of sugar slavery in the New World that changed everything. “The true Age of Sugar had begun — and it was doing more to reshape the world than any ruler, empire or war had ever done,” Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos write in their 2010 book, “Sugar Changed the World.” Over the four centuries that followed Columbus’s arrival, on the mainlands of Central and South America in Mexico, Guyana and Brazil as well as on the sugar islands of the West Indies — Cuba, Barbados and Jamaica, among others — countless indigenous lives were destroyed and nearly 11 million Africans were enslaved, just counting those who survived the Middle Passage. [Read more at the next link]
SUGAR: IN ART & MUSIC
Her article notes that Marvin Gaye used Barnes' painting for the cover of his "I Want You" album:
The Life that Sprang from Death: the Music and Dance of Sugar Work
Sugar = the Atlantic slave trade. African slavery = sugar.
Most of the over 12 million Africans who were shipped across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, Brazil, and South America owed their misery to sugar.
Most of the millions of people around the world who were growing accustomed to cheap sugar owed that sweet taste to the African slaves.
As Sugar Changed the World shows, this is a grim story of brutal conditions, constant abuse, and early death. But the Africans did not simply work, fight, flee, or die. They also made music and invented dances that were the very pulse of life. Music was woven into ceremonies, bringing African beliefs, beats, and worship across the ocean. Music mourned and defied, celebrated and uplifted. Every land where the Africans worked, where the cane grew, has its own form of beat, its own rhythms, its own songs and dances that can be traced back to sugar – and even to sources in Africa. And that was only the first step in the sugar-music-story. As workers traveled throughout the sugar lands – from Haiti to the Dominican Republic to Cuba; from the British islands to the Dominican Republic and Haiti – they brought music with them, creating ever new songs and dances blending traditions from each land.
[Continue reading at the next link]
Next track is a testament to Texas prison workers...
"HALF THE STORY'S NEVER BEEN TOLD..."
FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
The first thing archaeologists sought when they started digging in the now-vacant west yard of Rock Hall was a fireplace for cooking. The manor house had no kitchen, so cooking was done in a separate building. They found that structure's footprint and, within it, evidence of a fireplace common to plantations in Antigua. But that house, adjacent to Rock Hall manor, was larger than expected and more than a kitchen.
"This was probably also the place where the slaves lived,'' Matthews said. "We believe they essentially took control of this house, as if saying, 'We work here, we live here, and this is our space.' ''
Part of that assertion is based on the discovery of several caches of artifacts -- straight pins, iron nails and lead shot -- placed strategically in and around the house and the entrance to the cellar of the manor. Based on similar findings at other slave-related sites in the South, Matthews believes this may have been an invocation of ancestral spirits to protect the site from harm.
"It tells us that they may have been practicing a way of religion,'' Matthews said. "They may have been allowed to do that, or at least no one seems to have stopped it.''
These findings challenge a long-held view. "The thinking was that slavery dehumanized and took everything, including cultural memories,'' Matthews said. The evidence of Rock Hall slaves still engaged in West African religious rituals "suggests that they still thought of themselves as Africans.'' [Read more about this newly emerging perspective on history of owner-slave relations at the next 2 links]
(1) The Long Island History Journal, a peer-reviewed academic online publication, is published since 2009 by the Center for Global & Local History at Stony Brook University. It continues the Long Island Historical Journal that was founded by Roger Wunderlich in 1988.
The LIHJ is especially interested in articles treating the history of Long Island – Brooklyn, Queens, Nassau and Suffolk counties – in a national and/or global context.
The 1619 Project - The New York Times Magazine ***SUBSCRIPTION REQUIRED
The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.
"Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery None but ourselves can free our minds"
"Old pirates, yes, they rob I
Sold I to the merchant ships..."
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Very creative, imaginative, and inspiring, as always. 😊♥️👍