St. Johnian Kurt Marsh Jr. shared some of the history of the Fortsberg area, a critically important site in the island’s history, during a presentation hosted by the V.I. Education Department’s Division of Cultural Education.
Marsh, owner and principal of design firm Studio Majj LLC and a member of the St. Thomas-St. John Historic Preservation Committee and the St. John Coastal Zone Management Committee, has ties to the Samuel family, which has ownership of the property.
The virtual presentation on Thursday was made in conjunction with Freedom Week in honor of Virgin Islands Emancipation Day, July 3, and featured a pre-recorded video of Marsh touring the Fortsberg ruins.
The Samuel family has owned what is “perhaps the most critical site in the Virgin Islands historical narrative” for several generations, said Marsh. Fortsberg’s importance is tied to the 1733 slave revolt, which began at the nearby Carolina plantation in Coral Bay.
“This is western hemisphere history, not just St. John history,” said Marsh, noting the rebellion was the first successful revolution of enslaved people in the western hemisphere.
“They moved from Carolina to Fortsberg, carrying weapons in bundles of sticks to be incognito, then took over the site and the revolution spread across the entirety of St. John, all the way to the Durloo plantation, which is now Caneel Bay, where the bulk of the massacres and the largest-scale events took place.”
The Fortsberg fort was rebuilt in 1760, and it’s the ruins of that fort that remain on the site today.
In his presentation, Marsh pointed out the fort’s rubble stonework and rows of brick joined with lime mortar. The ruin features red and yellow bricks, the latter of which came in on Danish ships as ballast and can still be seen today in the territory’s plantation ruins and historic districts.
The fort’s walls are about two-and-a-half to three feet thick, said Marsh, who then pointed out the captain’s quarters in the fort’s center, where remnants of what appears to be a wood frame structure can be seen. Marsh also pointed out an archway leading to an enclosure whose walls appear to be charred.
“People would think this is an oven because the walls look charred, but if I were to guess, I might say this is where they stored the gunpowder for the cannons, because with this being a fort, the cannons here were active at one point,” he said.
Marsh went on to note that though the territory’s plantation ruins were commissioned by the Danish, the skill of the enslaved Africans is what brought rise to the structures.
“It’s really important when we have conversations about historic spaces and architecture to note that although these sites were commissioned by Denmark, a lot of what we see is African masonry, ingenuity, and excellence,” he said. “While these structures are Danish by design, they’re African by construction. It’s part of the reason why African slaves from that particular part of West African were brought here during the establishment of the plantation society, because the Danes wanted to take advantage of that skillset.”
Marsh went on to point out the irony between plantation ruins serving as monuments to a traumatic time in history, while also standing as testament to “the skill and ingenuity of the Africans,” he said.
The Forstberg ruins are unique on St. John, where most Danish-era plantation ruins fall within the boundaries of the Virgin Islands National Park. This gives the family that owns the land the opportunity to study, interpret, and share the property’s history themselves.
“I think it’s very important where we still have the opportunity to control how we interpret the spaces that we tell the full story,” said Marsh. “Fortsberg and many others on St. John are really critical to that, especially as St. John is continually seized and consumed by forces outside St. John that seek to diminish what would be the native ancestral story. I’d like to see opportunities where this space comes back to life. We in the family corporation are establishing parameters by which we figure out how we want to make the space accessible so people can enjoy it. We know the sanctity of the space and understand the history of the space, and we respect the ancestors who fought to give us the opportunity to claim this space.”
