Nicholas Abbey was built of locally obtained coral blocks in the 1650s and is one of the oldest standing plantation houses in Barbados. It is one of three Jacobean-style English manor houses in what was once British America (the others are Drax Hall in Barbados and Bacon's Castle, Williamsburg, Virginia). This photo shows the front entrance of the plantation house (the entrance portico was added long after initial construction); note the chimneys to the fireplaces. The site of the former slave village is very close to the house. The plantation itself, during the period of slavery, was large in terms of acreage and enslaved population by standards of the island. (For a history of the plantation, its main house, and its enslaved population, see Jerome Handler et al., Searching for a slave cemetery in Barbados [Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Center for Archaeological Investigations, Research Paper No. 59, June 1989], passim.)

Slide, Handler, personal collection

English

Image is in the public domain. Metadata is available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.

NW0082

Caribbean--Barbados

"Nicholas Abbey Plantation House, Barbados, 1985", Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed September 27, 2022, http://slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1438