Jamaica, Greenwood and Rose Hall Great Houses

The Greenwood Great House is on the north coast of Jamaica east of Montego Bay. The house was built primarily for entertainment purposes by Edward Barrett, who was the father of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Barretts were one of the wealthiest landowners in Jamaica and by the time of emancipation owned over 2,000 slaves, who worked in the sugarcane plantations.

A tour of the house takes about 30 minutes and will almost certainly be personal as the house receives few visitors. One reason is the road to the house, which is heavily pot-holed, This is in sharp contrast to a former owner of Greenwood who received an award from the Jamaican government for having the finest tarmac’ed road on the island.

There are some fascinating pieces in the house including a polyphon, a working barrel organ, and a piano that was owned by Queen Alexandra, the wife of King Edward VII. A recent delegation from the Danish government tried to buy the piano, but their offer was rebuffed.

The upper verandah gives an almost uninterrupted view of the Caribbean Sea and, if you use your imagination, you can almost see the curvature of the earth.

Greenwood Great House is set in attractive gardens and is worth every cent of the entrance fee.

The Rose Hall Great House is closer to Montego Bay and is associated with the infamous ‘White Witch’ of Rose Hall, Annie Palmer. Annie moved to Haiti when she was 11 with her English mother and Irish father. Annie immediately took a keen interest in voodoo. Her parents died from Yellow Fever soon afterwards, but Annie was coached in the art of voodoo by her nanny, who perished when Annie was 18. People close to Annie dying was a familiar theme during her short life. She moved to Jamaica and married John Rose Palmer, the owner of Rose Hall.

After 7 years, Annie Palmer murdered her husband, a pattern that was repeated twice more in the next three years with her two more husbands. Each was killed in a different bedroom using a different method. Annie Palmer also had many slaves lovers during her life and they helped Annie dispose of the bodies via a secret passage that led to the beach. Annie was hated by the slaves for her cruelty towards them, indeed one of her favourite pastimes was to watch them being punished from an upper window.

Annie Palmer was killed during the Christmas Insurrection of 1831 by the slaves on her estate. A brutal ending to a cruel life.

Rose Hall is also recommended simply because of the fascinating tale of Annie Palmer. It is almost miraculous that the house is still standing at all given that it lay derelict for 130 years, before being restored by John Rollins between 1965 and 1972 at a cost of $2.5 million.