Hope Transformed: A Historical Sketch of the Hope Landscape, St Andrew, Jamaica, 1660-1960

The landscape of the former Hope sugar estate, located on the Liguanea Plain in the south-eastern parish of St Andrew, Jamaica, has had along history. The history of human interaction with the Hope lands dates back to approximately 650 CE, when a section of the indigenous Tainos settled the area around Hope Tavern. In 1494 the Spanish captured the island and decimated the Taino population. However, the radical transformation; of the Hope lands, and indeed the entire island, from wilderness to landscape began with the invasion and seizure of the island by the English in 1655.

Immediately after seizure, the invading officers and later immigrants from Britain, North America, and other Caribbean islands were given generous land grants. Major Richard Hope took possession of over 2,600 acres on the Liguanea Plain, which from thence became known as Hope Estate. By the 1660s, Hope, like others of his counterparts, managed to establish a small sugar plantation, which developed by the mid-1700s into one of the island's largest, most productive and technologically advanced slave sugar estates. By the late 1830s, however, the once thriving Hope sugar estate entered an uninterrupted decline. In 1850, the dismantling of the Hope Estate land began, and in that year, over 600 acres were sold to the Kingston and Liguanea Water Works Company while the remaining 1,769 acres were leased to the owner of the adjoining Papine and Mona estates. In 1871, the government bought the land and all other assets of the water company and so got a foothold on Hope.

With the government's acquisition of the entire property in 1960, the landscape of Hope Estate underwent remarkable changes. By 1960 Hope was transformed from a sugar estate worked by hundreds of enslaved black people to a premiere urban centre of commerce, residential settlements and education.