Wade's Green Plantation

Wade's Green Plantation is the best-preserved example of a Loyalist cotton plantation in the Turks and Caicos Islands, dating from the 1790s when Loyalists fleeing the newly independent United States settled in the territory with their enslaved workforce. The ruins include the stone walls of the great house, a plantation office, the walled kitchen garden, and the foundations of the enslaved workers' quarters — a relatively rare case where the full social geography of a plantation site survives above ground.

The National Trust of the Turks and Caicos manages the site, and it can be visited with a local guide from Kew village. The ruins are substantial — the main house walls still stand to roof height in places — and the site is set in attractive dry scrubland typical of the island's interior. The nearby Kew village, one of the older settlements on North Caicos, provides context for how the post-plantation population continued to use the land.

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A story
The Loyalists who came to the Turks and Caicos after the American Revolution brought enslaved workers with them to establish cotton plantations on land they received as compensation for their losses. Wade's Green was one of the most ambitious of these estates, with a great house, walled kitchen garden, slave quarters, and outbuildings. The experiment largely failed — the soil was thin, hurricanes were frequent, and the cotton faced competition from American producers. Most of the Loyalist plantations were abandoned within two generations.

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