Arnos Vale Estate

Since you're parked on a dead end road, you'll have to retrace your steps here. Go back across the river (stay right this time), out to the bridge, across the bridge, by the Les Coteaux factory, up to the junction and left, and back towards Les Coteaux. In the village, stay straight instead of bearing left towards Scarborough. Follow this road (Arnos Vale Road) past the football (soccer) pitch, take your next left, and park. This is the Arnos Vale sugar factory.

Arnos Vale sugar factory is in the process of being converted into a restaurant. By the time you read this it probably will be a restaurant, so have a cold drink and lunch while you're here. (Note: in making this conversion, the owners made every effort to avoid disturbing archaeologically significant parts of the site, going so far as to hire a professional archaeologist [me] to inspect the site and suggest design and layout modifications. While they were not always successful, they should be applauded for their efforts to preserve the site for the future. Most development on the island does not even make a cusory effort.)

Arnos Vale is notable because it is one of only three factories on the island that still has an intact water wheel and crushing mill. It also has a steam engine, opposite the mill from the wheel, that makes it unique. Notice that the rollers are vertical. This is an older design, and was not as efficient as more modern horizontal mills. Nevertheless, the owner of Arnos Vale chose to keep the vertical mill, upgrading instead his power source from water to steam. Planters were constantly upgrading their factories and mill equipment, which is why I've neglected to mention when any of these places were built. Tobago was initially settled by the British in 1763, and most of the original factories were built in the following two decades. More than 100 once existed on the island. What you see here at Arnos Vale, and at the other sites on the island, is their layout at abandonment.

Also present at this site are the remains of a standing chimney. All factories had these to dissipate the smoke from the fires that were constantly lit while crushing and boiling were in progress. If you face the chimney from the uphill side, you'll see sort of a ditch running 15 or 20 feet to the left from the base. This was the location of the jamaica train, a series of five coppers in a row that the cane juice was boiled in. The coppers were of decreasing size. The one you are probably standing next to was in the middle somewhere. The largest was even bigger, and sat at the base of the chimney, while the smallest sat at the left end of the train. Called the strike pan, this smallest copper had a fire beneath it made of crushed dried canes called bagas. The flue led beneath each copper, allowing all of them to be heated with one fire. On the far side of the coppers, and running parallel to the train, was the fire wall. This wall had openings under each copper that allowed the temperature of each to be carefully controlled. Cane was ladled into the largest copper and heated to a certain temperature. It was then ladled into the next copper, and heated some more, etc., etc., etc., until, in the strike pan, granulation of the sugar occurred. This product, wet sugar, was ladled out into a cooling vat.

Ultimately the wet sugar was ladled into barrels that were placed on the second story of the room to your right, called the cooling room (only basal foundations are left here at Arnos Vale). Holes were punched in the bottom of the barrels, and the liquid portion of the wet sugar (molasses) was allowed to drain into receptacles on the first story. What was left in the original barrels was muscovado sugar, raw sugar that was then shipped to England for refining into more or less what we see on our tables today.

To the conclusion

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