VI Portland
The parish of Portland was named after the Duke of Portland, who was Governor of the colony at the date of its formation. It includes the old parish of St. George and part of St. Thomas, from which it was originally taken in 1723. St. George derived its name from the patron saint of England. Roby thinks that the name might have received additional appropriateness from the fact that George was the Christian name of the Duke of Albemarle, Sir Thomas Modyford’s relative and patron; as also of Colonel Nedham, his son-in-law.
Port Antonio, which was then established, has two of the finest and securest harbours in the island. It is divided into Upper and Lower Titchfield, named after the property of the Duke of Portland. Upper Titchfield stands on a peninsula and contains Fort George, the old military barracks.
In the year 1721, when strenuous efforts were made to induce immigrants from the British Isles to settle in the north-eastern part of the island, the Governor was empowered to make grants in the king’s name:
To every white person, being a protestant, thirty acres; to every white person in the family, thirty acres; to every free mulatto Indian or Negro, twenty acres; to every slave bought, five acres; with a proviso that no person not having fifteen white persons in the family should have above 400 acres in the whole. On the condition that the grantees should settle and plant the land, or some part thereof, within six months from the date of the patent, and should not alienate the land for seven years from that date. Special facilities were given to intending settlers: the lands were exonerated from all arrears of quit rent and all grants made without fee of office, and the settlers freed from all taxes (general or parochial) (except quit rents) for seven years.
In 1723 the receiver-general was authorised to raise a sum of £1500, to be applied: £1000 in purchasing lands, &c., provided by Act 9 Geo. 1, c. 8, and to provide each newcomer (man or woman) that should come over and settle within twelve months with two barrels of beef and one barrel of flour to be delivered at Port Antonio free of all charges as a means of support until the lands allotted to them should be planted with proper provisions, and until the same were grown up and become fit for use—and also to provide proper necessaries and conveniences for the newcomers travelling to the land where they were to settle.
To encourage new settlers and on account of the distance from the supreme court (then held in Spanish Town), persons settling were freed from all suits, actions and arrests, and public taxes, for three years.
All these Acts and the facilities and encouragements apparently proved ineffectual to settle the parish, and in 1725 an Act was passed and the privileges of the previous Acts extended to all inhabitants of the island as well as newcomers.
In 1730, the Crown having purchased the remainder of Lynch’s Island, the twenty acres originally allotted for a town and fortifications were vested in the Crown as they were found necessary for building wharves and stores and for careening men-of-war.
In 1733 an Act was passed for cutting a road from the breastwork, building a defensible house, and prohibiting the sale of rum in Titchfield. Breastwork (about one and a half miles from Port Antonio) is still a local name on the Golden Vale road.
In 1743 settlers in Portland were granted the same privileges as persons settling at Manchioneal and Norman’s Valley in St. Thomas-in-the-East, by Act 9 Geo. 2, that is; their passages were paid and that of their slaves not exceeding twenty, and the receiver-general was to subsist them and their slaves for twelve months on the following scale: each white person, four barrels of beef and 400 lb. of biscuit or bread; each slave a barrel of herrings and 400 lb. of biscuit or bread—the number of slaves not exceeding twenty. Every settler was entitled to a grant of land: for himself, thirty acres; for his wife, fifty acres; for each child, twenty acres; for every other white, fifteen acres; for each slave, ten acres; not to exceed in the whole 300 acres. He was exempted from taxes for five years, but had to commence settlement within three months from the date of his patent.
This Act was limited in its duration, and subsequently expired.
Long tells us that under the inducements of the laws passed between 1736 and 1752, in sixteen years, one hundred and eight families and fifteen artificers were introduced into Portland and elsewhere at an expense of £17,898, but that many of them failed for lack of capital.
In 1780 all the restrictions, conditions, penalties and forfeitures imposed on settlers by the several Acts from 1721 to 1776 having failed of their end, these Acts were repealed, and lands were to be held free from such restrictions, &c., and thereafter grants were to be made free therefrom—with a proviso excepting persons who had within four years before evaded the condition of their grants.
From this date legislation with a view to settle the parish appears to have been discontinued, as no more Acts with that object are to be found in the statute book.
In 1722 it was enacted that fifty acres at a certain place named Pattison’s Point and thirty acres on Ruther’s or Lynch’s Island should be allotted for a town, and that two hundred and fifty acres adjoining should be a common belonging to the said town or towns.
By an Act of 1725 (an explanatory Act for the further encouraging the settling the parish of Portland) it was enacted that for enlarging the said town of Titchfield which had sprung up, fifty more acres should be added to the town and one hundred acres should be added to the common. By 1785 it appeared that divers people unlawfully encroached on the common of 350 acres, and the land had become of little or no use or profit to the town and the benefit was in danger of being entirely lost to them. Certain trustees were appointed by act 26 Geo. 3, c. 7 (an Act for vesting the common lands of the town of Titchfield in the parish of Portland, in trustees, for the purpose of raising a fund for erecting and maintaining a free school in the said town; and for other purposes therein mentioned), for the direction and management of a free school to be erected in or near the town of Titchfield, to be maintained and endowed from the proceeds of the 350 acres of common land. The object of the trust was to provide instruction for youths, without charge to their parents, in reading, writing, arithmetic, Latin, Greek, mathematics, &c., and the masters were to be of the Church of England. The school was open to children of the island generally, but those of the inhabitants of the town of Titchfield were to have the preference.
The school was in active operation from its foundation to the year 1855, when it appears to have been closed in consequence of a report made on its “state and condition” by Henry Laidlaw, stipendiary magistrate, in pursuance of a commission entrusted to him by the Governor, and because of the trust having been thrown into Chancery by reason of having incurred debts amounting to nearly £300, for which judgment was obtained against the trustees in the Grand Court of October 1852, in the case of “Anderson Charles vs. the Trustees of the Titchfield Free School Trust.”
From the revelations laid bare in Laidlaw’s report, and from the tenor of a resolution passed at a meeting of the trustees held on January 3, 1853, it may be gathered that the trust at this time was in a very bad state.
In 1883 a scheme was drawn up by the Jamaica Schools Commission, by which the management of the trust was vested in the Schools Commission and a board of local managers appointed by the Governor on the recommendation of the Schools Commission, and in 1903 the Titchfield lands were vested in trustees appointed by the Governor.
Olivier Park in Port Antonio was named after Sir Sydney Olivier, when he was Colonial Secretary; Carder Park after a benefactor to the town.
The fruit trade, which was opened up in Portland in the year 1868, has made Port Antonio a town of considerable importance.
The Maroon settlement, called Moore Town, named after Henry Moore, Governor in 1760–62, is nine miles from Port Antonio on the banks of the Rio Grande.
There are at Low Layton, 150 feet above sea level, the remains of an extinct volcano.
Manchioneal was the scene of some of the exploits of “Tom Cringle,” recorded in his Log; and the great house on Muirton is said to be the one to which he was taken on his arrival from Cuba with yellow fever.
Darlingford, an extensive coco-nut plantation belonging to the heirs of Sir Charles Darling, a former Governor of Jamaica, stands around the village of Manchioneal.
At Spring Garden is a ruined fort, said to have been erected against the buccaneers. Sir Thomas Modyford, Governor from 1664 to 1670, is probably commemorated in Modyford’s Gully at Dry River in St. George. Balcarres Hill is perhaps named after Alexander, Earl of Balcarres, Governor in 1795–1801, but Crawford Town was so called before the Earl of Balcarres came to the Island. Seaman’s Valley is said to have derived its name from the destruction of a party of seamen by the Maroons.
In 1842 the portion of the original parish of St. George to the west of the little Spanish River, together with part of the eastern portion of St. Mary, was taken to constitute the separate parish of Metcalfe. On the reduction of the number of parishes in 1867 this parish of Metcalfe fell to St. Mary, and the parish of St. George as reduced in 1842 fell to Portland.