The Danish West India and Guinea Company Warehouse Christiansted National Historic Site: Proposed restoration and slave trade museum

Cissel, William

In 1952, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, through a Memorandum of Agreement with the Governor of the Virgin Islands, established Virgin Islands National Historic Site (in 1960, renamed Christiansted National Historic Site) (Figures 1, 2, and 3). The Advisory Board on National Parks, Historic Sites, Buildings and Monuments had declared that "the wharf area and its buildings ... and the Government House and grounds in Christiansted, St. Croix ... are of national historical significance as an excellent example of the Danish economy and way of life in the Virgin Islands ..... (GMP 1986:26). The National Park Service was mandated to preserve "the integrity of the ... historic structures and grounds, and to ... [further] their interpretation to the American people as a great national heritage" (Ibid.). It has been faithful to this obligation through restoration, rehabilitation, maintenance, and interpretive media. If current negotiations to acquire the former Danish West India & Guinea Company Warehouse from the U.S. Postal Service are successful, the National Park Service will have the opportunity to both restore the last unpreserved historic structural complex within the boundaries of the National Historic Site, and the great challenge to interpret one of the greatest human dramas of the American people - the African slave trade. St. Croix, with its unique history, has had the privilege of claiming several "firsts" in the national patrimony: the Columbus association (1493), the demise of Native American cultures at the hands of the Spanish in the Post-Contact period (1512), the first foreign salute to the flag of the new nation (1776), and the emancipation of the slaves (1848). These events, as important as they are, pale in comparison to the magnitude and impact of the African slave trade, played out over centuries. Islands like St. Croix were at center stage in a economic system that linked Europe, West Africa, the West Indies, and North and South America. On this side of the Atlantic, the story of Denmark's participation in the trade - and its status as the first European nation to outlaw it in 1803 - is physically embodied in the Danish West India & Guinea Company Warehouse complex within the boundaries of Christiansted National Historic Site. Preliminary inquiries to the National Register of Historic Places and the National Historic Landmarks program indicate that this complex is probably unique, both in age and architectural complexity. This Preliminary Report has been prepared to indicate the wealth of physical and documentary resources, as well as historical scholarship, on the subject of the African slave trade relative to St. Croix and the Danish West India & Guinea Company's complex at Christiansted in particular.