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Our People

May Stevens

 

May Stevens Yvonne May Stevens was born on the 28th May 1910 into the large family of James Henry Stevens and his wife Ethlinda Leonora nee Penn. Her father was at the time, the Master of the Leper Home in Sandy Point but by 1914 the family had moved to Nevis where he held the post of Assistant to the Surveyor on that island. May grew up in a disciplined close-knit house hold that valued family and...

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Zenaida Katzen

 

Zenaida Katzen Zenaida Katzen was born in Eastern Siberia in 1911 to a Russian Orthodox mother and a Jewish father. Due in great part to her father’s allegiance to Tsar Nicholas II, her family had no choice but to flee Russia or face certain death at the hands of the Bolsheviks as the October 1917 Russian revolution advanced to the Russian Far Eastern town of Nikolaevsk-na-Amur. The family took refuge in Shanghai, China. After completing high school...

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Robert Douglas

 

Robert Douglas Robert (registered as Isaac Lewis) Douglas was born in St. Kitts on the 4th November 1882. He was the son of Robert Gould Douglas, a clerk, and his wife Margaret, residents of New Town.  By the 1890s St. Kitts was experiencing serious social and economic difficulties that culminated in the violent disturbances of 1896, known as the Portuguese Riots.  For many migration in search of work was the only option.  Douglas was among the...

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Our Places

St. Barnabas Anglican Chapel

 

ST. BARNABAS ANGLICAN CHAPEL is a small place of worship on Malone Avenue. Shortly after Governor Philippe Lonvillier De Poincy arrived in St. Kitts in 1639, he donated the service of fifty enslaved workers for the construction of a very fair Hospital, in a very healthy place, where such sick persons as are unable to effect their recovery at their own houses, are attended, and maintained, and visited by Physitians and Surgeons, till they are restored...

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The National Museum

 

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM is located in what used to be the Treasury Building.  It is also the home of the St. Christopher National Trust.   Once situated on the Basseterre Bay front, the building is now at the meeting point of Basseterre and the reclaimed land of Port Zante. The Treasury actually moved to the corner of Church Street and Central Street in 1996 and the National Museum gradually moved in. In 1857 St. Kitts had a new...

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Liverpool Row

 

Liverpool Row 2008   Liverpool Row stretches in the opposite direction from Bank Street. It heads West from the Circus. It is not clear if this street actually existed in French times. If it did, it would not have been known by its current name. Basseterre - detail from McMahon 1828 Liverpool Row was the commercial centre of Basseterre. This was where most merchants set up business. If they did not own a plantation house, they would have lived...

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Our Events

Carnival - New Years Day

 

In June 1957 Basil Henderson, Major L.N Alphonso, Tony Lawrence, Leroy Coury, Alexis Knight, E Vanterpool and Al Barker formed a temporary committee entrusted with the planning of St. Kitts’ first Carnival. It was felt that a Carnival along the lines of the Trinidad one would help the economy and give visitors something to look forward to. By the end of that year St. Kitts had its first queen show, Calypso Show and street parade...

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Treaty of Basseterre 18 June 1981

 

Treaty of Basseterre Historical BackgroundThe idea of unification within the Caribbean region gained the interest of the British Colonial Office in the late nineteenth Century mostly as a colonial administrative device designed to cut the cost of managing the colonies with failing economies and a growing reliance on Britain. The 20th century however saw a growing discontent with regards to the unrepresentative nature of the island governments. In 1914, T. Albert Marryshow of Grenada, founded the Representative...

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Statehood 28th February 1967

 

Statehood flag The West Indies Federation was an experiment in unity for the English Speaking Caribbean and should have resulted in an independent West Indian nation.. After long discussions it came into being in 1958. Elections took place that year but Jamaica and Trinidad did not join the new political unit with the same commitment as the other islands. Economic prosperity meant that these two islands did not feel the need to be part of a...

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"In this  bright future, you can't forget your past"

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