Great House of Rose Hall Plantation - Essay Example

Great House of Rose Hall Plantation The Rose Hall Plantation today is not what the original creator, John Palmer, had in mind. Today the Rose Hall Plantation consists of a lavish resort for tourists. Americans own what was once Jamaica’s largest plantation. Lost in the endless travel guides, the new golf course, spooky ghost tales and other changes is the real history of Rose Hall. No one would visit this historical site if the truth about Rose Hall’s was not glamorized by publicists and ghost enthusiasts. The truth lies in Jamaica’s colonial past, in a time where slave labor built Rose Hall. What all the people profiting off of Rose Hall today wants the world to forget is that Rose Hall started as a sugar cane plantation, not a Caribbean getaway. The Great House of Rose Hall Plantation is being used as a museum currently. There are tours daily, with a pub in the basement (Pye). Most of what used to be the Rose Hall Plantation is called the Rose Hall district (Pye). The Rose Hall district consists of over four thousand acres that includes a golf course name “White Witch Golf Course”, a water park, a Ritz-Carlton Spa & Resort, a gated community of vacation homes for the wealthy and the Great House Museum (Pearson). The Rose Hall district is being developed by Rose Hall Development Ltd. John Rollins founded Rose Hall Development Ltd. He bought Rose Hall in 1965 (Kemsly). When John Rollins arrived in Jamaica to see Rose Hall, the Great Hall was is great ruin. The Great Hall’s three stories were redesigned. Rollins spent over two and half million dollars restoring the Great House alone (Pearson). The Great House Museum is decorated in 17th era décor. Mahogany floors are used on interior windows, doorways, paneling and the wooden ceilings. Silk wallpaper has been hung on the walls, along with lavish crystal chandeliers (Kemsly). Art dating back to the 17th century decorates the museum. John Rollins intended to return the Great House to original splendor, but leaned too heavily on local legends and folklore to be historically correct. The Great House at Rose Hall was originally finished between 1770 and 1780. The builder was the Honorable John Palmer (Yates). The Rose Hall Plantation is located on Montego Bay part of St. James Parish. This twelve room mansion was fashioned in a Georgian style. The Great House was built on where another house once stood. The previous house was also called Rose Hall, because had been the residence by the Reverend John Kelly and his wife Mary, whose daughter was named Rosa (Yates). Rosa Kelly was John Palmer’s second wife. He was Rosa Kelly’s fourth husband. Rosa Kelly’s first husband, George Ash, started the mansion in 1750 (Kelmsy). The Rose Hall plantation consisted of around two thousand slaves. The crop was mostly sugar cane, but rum was also another product manufactured at Rose Hall (Yates). John Palmer and Rosa were married for twenty-three years (Pearson). Rosa was so well known that a monument was erected in a local parish church at Montego Bay. John Palmer lived at Rose Hall Plantation after Rosa died (Yates). After John Palmer died, fiction and fact become confused. Local legend would lead one to believe that the Palmer family remained in the house, handing the estate down from one generation unto the next until 1820 (Pearson). Supposedly around 1820, John Palmer’s great-nephew John Rose Palmer inherited the estate. This is where fact and fiction blur. John Palmer’s wife was the now infamous, Annee Palmer. The legend that John Rollins and his heirs have propagated is that Annee Palmer was witch. The story is that Annee Palmer was into voodoo. Another part of the legend says Annee killed three of her husbands, plus numerous slave lovers. Annee was reported to have been murdered during the Christmas slave uprising in the Great House (Kemsly). Ghostly apparitions of Annee have been reported by past and present guests. One little girl who roamed the ruins of the Great House before John Rollins renovated the mansion spoke of seeing what the natives had name “The White Ghost”, Annee Palmer (Kemsly). Tourists are reported sighting Annee frequently (Pearson). Reality is often overlooked. The Jamaican Family Search Genealogy Research Library had assistant archivist, Geoffrey Yates research Rose Hall through legal records in 1965 (Yates). Yates findings are opposite to the legends swirling the popular resort today. The first fallacy concerns the Palmer family. The official website of Rose Hall deceptively says “the estate went through many hands” (Pearson). This leads people to believe that between John Palmer and John Rose Palmer that the Palmers retained the estate. This is misleading. After Rosa Palmer died, John remarried a woman named Rebecca (Yates). Along with many of his peers, John Palmer had borrowed heavily against the Rose Hall Plantation. While he and his new wife, Rebecca, were alive the plantation ran like a mortgaged business (Yates). Mortgage payments were made from the sugar cane and rum sales. John did not even die at Rose Hall, but lived at a smaller house in Jamaica (Yates). After John died, Rebecca returned to England (Yates). She received an allotment from the estate as long as she lived (Yates). Yet after Rebecca died, creditors took over the Rose Hall plantation, assigning a solicitor (Yates). This exposes the first untruth. The Palmers were not wealthy plantation owners who passed the estate down to heirs. The first untruth led to the second misconception. John Rose Palmer never owned Rose Hall Plantation (Yates). John Rose Hall came to Jamaica around 1818. He became the solicitor of Rose Hall. After John Rose Palmer died, Annee left Rose Hall before the slave uprising (Yates). She sold her share of Rose Hall for £200 sterling (Yates). Annee died far away from the haunted Rose Hall at Bonavista, near Anchovy. The legend of the White Witch really came from a book by Delisser named “The White Witch of Rose Hall”. Delisser’s book came from a sermon written by a Reverend Waddell (Yates). Reverend Waddell had preached at Rose Hall after Annee Palmer left. Later in a pamphlet sermon, Reverend Waddell spoke of a punishment room in the dungeon of Rose Hall (Yates). Since Reverend Waddell was an abolitionist, he spoke of terrible justice being meted out against a Mrs. Palmer when slaves strangled the cruel mistress (Yates). This was false, since Rosa Palmer had not been strangled and Annee still lived (Yates). In Jamaica, especially during the slave uprising, abolitionists used propaganda. Along with the real accounts of cruelty towards slaves, some sought to incite world outrage at slavery. This was a time before the American Civil War. Reverend Waddell might have had a good reason to embellish his tale of vengeance. Another explanation is Reverend Waddell pamphlet did not clarify which Rose Hall he spoke of. There was a Rose Hall in Guyana (Chickrie). An uprising did occur at this there (Chickrie). Although the slaves did not strangle Annee Palmer, they did manage to damage the Great House at Rose Hall during the uprising. The roof was torn off and the house looted (Higman). Unlike many main houses on Jamaican plantations of the time, the Rose Hall Great House retained the main structure of four walls (Higman). Most main houses were burned to the ground during the uprising (Kemsly). By 1930, what was left of the roof that had been repaired after the slave uprising was caving in. Windows had been bust out, and the yard was overgrown. The house lay in ruins. The legend of the White Witch, along with the economy kept buyers at bay until John Rollins came along in the sixties. What had once kept the Rose Hall in ruins might have been one of the reasons John Rollins bought the property. One can only speculate about the motive behind John Rollins decision to buy Rose Hall. There is no doubt that the Jamaican history of voodoo, slavery, and restitution surrounding Rose Hall has been a major factor in the success of Rose Hall as a tourist destination. The Great House Museum, all though not historically accurate about Rose Hall, does date back to the fashion of Jamaican plantations of the 17th century. If John Palmer had unlimited monetary resources like John Rollins, maybe Rose Hall main house would have been decorated lavishly like the Great House is now. The fact is John palmer did not have the money to afford velvet to wrap the chandeliers strings in to protect the metal from the sea air like John Rollins did (Kemsly). John Rollins renovated the Rose Hall Great House in what he perceived to be a 17th century Jamaican plantation, not on what John Palmer actually created. The real tragedy surrounding the Rose Hall Plantation is the loss of the real history. Not only the loss of the real Palmer history, but that of the slaves. Records were kept in Jamaica on not only the Palmers, but the slaves as well (Yates). Geoffery Yates traced Annee Palmer’s real slaves giving names, gender, and ages (Yates). Why could the slaves of Rose Hall not be traced through public records? The answer is easy. No one was ever interested in the real slaves. After the uprising and the rumors of the white witch started circulating, the lie was easier to live with than the truth. The slaves triumphed over an evil mistress. No tourist would want to visit a former slave plantation, but make the plantation haunted and shrouded in mystery. That is what sells. The reality is over two thousand slaves toiled on the Rose Hall Plantation, yet all history mentions is the white mistress. The fact that Rose Hall Plantation’s Great House was the center of a Jamaican sugar cane plantation has been overlooked by everyone. References Cited Chickrie, Raymond. HISTORY OF MY PEOPLE The Afghan Muslims of Guyana. 8 Sep. 2001. HISTORY OF MY PEOPLE The Afghan Muslims of Guyana. 22 Apr. 2006. http://www.afghan-network.net/Culture/afghan-guyana.htm Higman, B.W. Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001. Kemsly, Loretta. “Rose Hall: Home of the White Witch of Jamaica.” 2001. Moondance. 22 Apr. 2006. http://lore.moondance.org/rosehall.html Pearson, David. “News Room.” 2006. Rose Hall. 22 Apr. 2006. http://www.rosehall.com/news_room.htm Pye, David. “Planning in Paradise.” The Meeting Professional. (26) 3 (2006) Yates, Geoffrey, S. “Rose Hall-Death of a Legend.” 1965. 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