Annaberg is a reminder to the Virgin Islands that “Sugar was King”. The ruins represent a colonial-era processing facility known as a “sugar works” designed and built exclusively for the large-scale production of raw cane-sugar and Its two valuable by products, rum and molasses. It was constructed between 1797 and 1805, at the pinnacle of the great sugar boom of the turn of the 19′” century.
The Virgin Islands were a colony of Denmark before the United States purchased it in 1917. The diverse backgrounds of the inhabitants of the Danish West Indies are dearly evident In a list of Annaberg’s owners. The first land holding in the area was taken up in 1721 by a French Huguenot refugee, lsaac Constantin. Upon Constantin’s death, ownership of the plantation was passed to his son-In-law, a Dane, Mads Larsen; And, in 175B, the property was purchased by Salomon Zeeger. A Dutch immigrant from the Island of St. Eustatius It was Zeeger who named the property Annaberg (meaning Anna’s Mountain) to honour his wife, Anna deWindt Zeeger.
In 1863, Annaberg was purchased by Thomas Letsom Lloyd of Tortola. For a time, Lloyd struggled to keep the estate in operation, but in 1867, a violent hurricane followed by a series of devastating earthquakes, finally put an end to sugar production at Annaberg. With his factory in ruin in the spring of 1871, Thomas Lloyd sold Annaberg to his property overseer, George Francis, and returned to Tortola.
