The Grove Place Baobab: A Living Witness to St. Croix History
- Aug 11
- 2 min read
Standing beneath the Grove Place Baobab, it’s hard to appreciate its size through a photograph alone.
Its massive trunk rises from the ground before breaking into an incredible network of limbs stretching in every direction. But what interested me even more than its size was realizing just how much history has unfolded around this tree.
The baobab is native to Africa, not St. Croix. This particular tree is believed to have been planted around 1750, making it roughly 275 years old and recognized as the oldest and largest baobab in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
When this tree was young, St. Croix was part of the Danish West Indies, and the plantation economy surrounding it was built on the forced labor of enslaved Africans.
It was already nearly 100 years old when enslaved people across St. Croix rose up and demanded their freedom in 1848, leading to emancipation on July 3.
But emancipation didn’t suddenly bring equality.
Formerly enslaved Crucians and their descendants continued facing restrictive labor laws, low wages and difficult plantation conditions. In 1878, those frustrations erupted during the uprising that became known as Fireburn.
Through all of it, this tree was here.
By the early 1900s, Grove Place had become an important part of St. Croix’s organized labor movement. D. Hamilton Jackson helped organize plantation workers fighting for better wages and conditions, and in 1915, a gathering and feast was held beneath this very baobab.
Two years later, in 1917, St. Croix and the rest of the Danish West Indies were transferred to the United States.
The tree was still standing.
Since then, it has endured generations of change and some of the Caribbean’s most destructive hurricanes. Its canopy has been battered, limbs have been lost, and still it continues to grow.
That history is why I wanted to photograph it.
Traveling with a camera, especially somewhere as beautiful as St. Croix, it’s easy to focus on beaches, sunsets, turquoise water and the places everyone recognizes. I took plenty of those photographs.
But I also like finding the places that make me stop, do a little research and learn something about where I am.
At first glance, this is an incredible old tree.
Once you know its history, it becomes something more.
Nearly three centuries are written into that trunk. Enslaved Africans and their descendants lived and worked around it. Emancipation came while it stood here. Workers organized beneath its branches. St. Croix changed nations. Hurricanes tore through its canopy.
And still, it grew.
I didn’t want to simply photograph one of the oldest and largest trees in the Virgin Islands.
I wanted to photograph a witness.
A living connection to Africa.A witness to slavery and emancipation.A gathering place in the struggle for workers’ rights.And nearly 300 years later, a living piece of Crucian history still rooted in the soil of St. Croix.
📍 The Grove Place Baobab | St. Croix, U.S.V.I.
Photography by Kenneth Hiner | Kenneth Hiner Photography
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