How two families, one black, one white, built a town

One of the side effects (hazards?) of being an amateur historian (I’m neither an academic nor professional historian but I have a deep love for history) is that one becomes interested in one’s own heritage. No less in my case. I’m still in the course of discovery and have come across information that frankly, startled me. There was a time, going back 150 years or more, when for one small town in Jamaica, my paternal ancestors were a big deal.

Walkerswood in St. Ann in northern Jamaica, not far from Ocho Rios, is most famous for its jerk sauce. As someone declared, “Walkerswood is the Jamaican Jerk sauce by which all others are measured.”

Walkerswood Caribbean Foods grew out of a community cooperative that took shape in the 1970s. Residents in the town and a few from surrounding communities began creating craft and other items.

Christine, my mom, became a member of the cooperative. She would take raw wool home and deputize the children in the house to help her to wash, dry and then weave the wool. She would dye the yarn and knitted these into hats, sweaters, table mats and other items. The cooperative diversified into food items. Mama would take home large quantities of crude cornflakes, oftentimes more than we could consume. It was nowhere close to the quality of imported brands sold in supermarkets. The first forays into jerk sauce occurred in about 1976.

From those humble beginnings, Walkerswood Caribbean Foods, with about 80 employees, is now an important niche exporter of about 20 varieties of spices and associated products such as pepper sauce, curry paste, barbecue sauce and various iterations of jerk seasoning. Its products are sold in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and elsewhere in the Caribbean.

Teetering on bankruptcy several times, it was eventually bought and was transformed from the cooperative to a corporate model. It is a lesson in how community-based businesses struggle to remain true to their identity while trying to be profitable. The community link remains through the Walkerswood Co-operative Pepper Farmers Association, one of the company’s chief suppliers.

Harvey/Henry
The town, Walkerswood, owes its existence and relative affluence to two families – the Pringles/Simsons and the Harveys/Henrys.

The Harvey/Henry story is not well known and it is something I knew nothing about while growing up. My older siblings were not familiar with it. Much of what follows is due to information gleaned by a brother by way of a much older cousin, in addition to further digging on my part. It is a story that needs further research.

The Harveys, a black family, came into hundreds of acres of land sometime in the 1800s. As to how and exactly when they did so is not yet clear. What is undisputed is that they owned the land before the 1880s. It was not common for black Jamaicans to own that much land at that time in Jamaica’s history so soon after the end of enslavement in 1838. While it is conjecture at this point, it seems that the Harveys may have come into the land as early as the 1840s or 1850s, and likely by the 1860s.

In March 1882, one of the Harvey girls, Matilda, 24, married Thomas Henry, 26. They are my great-grandparents. In March 1881, exactly a year earlier, Thomas’ older brother, Richard, 37, had married Elizabeth, 31, a widow who seemed to have previously been married to a Harvey. It was the second marriage as well for Richard, a widower.

Most of the land appeared to have fallen under Thomas and Matilda’s control. For reasons not yet clear to us, my great-grandparents sold off most of the land while giving some of it away. The schools, community center and several churches, such as the old Baptist church (that I attended as a child) , the newer Baptist church, and the Methodist church, were all built on Harvey land, likely given freely to the community and churches. Some of the land was later acquired by Reynolds, a bauxite mining company. Most were bought by residents who built their homes. One guess is that more than 50 percent of Walkerswood residential homes are built on land once owned by Harvey/Henry.

An uncle, Alton Henry, whose family and ours traveled to church together while I was a child, played a role in the early movement that was the precursor to the 1970s Walkerswood cooperative. This is the official story as told by Walkerswood Caribbean Foods:

The initiative that launched Walkerswood Caribbean Foods is rooted in the rich history of community action, which has characterized Walkerswood village from the 1930s.

Following the nationwide riots of 1938 for better working conditions, a partnership emerged between Alton Henry, Peter Hinds and other village farm workers, Thom and Rita Girvan, engaged in the Government’s Social Welfare programme and Minnie and Fiona Simson of the Bromley Great House. Together they formed the “Pioneer Club” in 1940 on three acres of land. Out of this grew the Lucky Hill Co-operative Farm, the first registered co-operative farm in Jamaica.

Martin Henry (no relation to us) passed on the story as told to him by Norman Girvan, a leading university professor and researcher in Jamaica and the son of Thom and Rita Girvan. Minnie Simson and her daughter, Fiona, owners of Bromley estate

had come in contact with moral rearmament (MRA) out of England. Bromley became a centre for MRA meetings, for development activism and for devotion…. There were these two men from the village, Peter Hinds and Alton Henry…[who] used to come to Mrs. Simson’s every Sunday morning for prayers, and right after prayers Thom [Girvan] would start talking to them and asking them what were their greatest needs. Out of that he formed the Walkerswood Pioneer Club with the two men as leaders.

Though the club was founded in Walkerswood in St. Ann, the decision was made to establish the first cooperative farm in Lucky Hill in the parish of St. Mary, less than ten miles away. Alton, my father’s oldest brother, moved to New Pen in Lucky Hill and oversaw the cooperative farm there.

Uncle Alton inherited much of the land not sold off or given away that were still in Henry hands in Walkerswood. He was “head cook” and “bottle washer” in the Baptist church of my childhood – organist, choirmaster, church secretary and deacon. Little did I know that he was scion of large tracts of land near to the church and on which the church was built, and in the Cottage area of Walkerswood.

Pringle/Simson
The Pringles were an unusual Jamaican white family, possibly the wealthiest family on the island. A Scottish doctor, John Pringle, moved to Jamaica in the 1870s, married into wealth and privilege on the island, and gradually took ownership of several large properties, including Roaring River, Laughing Waters and Bromley, all in St. Ann, as well as Manor Park in St. Andrew.

According to Martin Henry, “John Pringle brought with him to Jamaica, from his own experiences on the fringes of British society in the Outer Hebrides, a working social conscience which members of his family inherited.”

Toward the end of his life, Pringle was instrumental in the formation of the Jamaica Banana Producers’ Association (JBPA) in 1927, a cooperative and a forerunner to what has since become one of the country’s largest groups of companies, Jamaica Producers Group. Martin Henry said “the JBPA was a cooperative of big and small private banana farmers, formed to challenge the unfair dominance of the banana trade by the banana companies, particularly the American United Fruit Company and the British Elders and Fyffes.”

The Pringles, close friends of Norman Manley, one of the country’s political fathers, were involved in Manley’s creation of Jamaica Welfare, which has evolved into the Social Development Commission, one of the government’s most vital social agencies. They were, apparently, strong supporters and backers of black nationalist, pan Africanist and Jamaica National Hero, Marcus Garvey.

[Another John Pringle, grandson of the original John Pringle, quite possibly played the most decisive role in the development of Jamaica’s tourism industry. He was the island’s first director of tourism and laid the foundation to make it the country’s most important economic engine.]

Minnie Simson inherited the Bromley property from her father, the elder John Pringle and, along with her daughter, Fiona, was instrumental in the formation of the Pioneer Club in Walkerswood and the cooperative farm at New Pen in Lucky Hill.

The Simsons also helped to form the Walkerswood Community Council. Among the initiatives of the council was the creation of Cottage Industries, which later grew into what is now Walkerswood Caribbean Foods, currently located on land that was previously part of the Bromley property.

It appears Walkerswood would not be what it is today without the generosity of these two families, one black, one white, who acted independently of each other but whose lives also converged in unexpected ways to make Walkerswood a growing, thriving and prosperous community.

Eron Henry is author of Reverend Mother, a novel