Silent Silos

It appears the root of my devotion to beautiful, yet impractical things doesn’t stem from naivety, but has long traveled through the veins of my family tree.

It’s said that along this road my great-great-grandfather subscribed to the idea of “glamping” long before it was a thing. It’s a story that my great-grandmother, Maud, recounted for the book Eleuthera, the island called Freedom with a hint of humor in her eyes and exasperation escaping her lips: 

“During the pineapple season, when barges were loaded and brought to Governor’s Harbour to fill the waiting schooner, it was found more expedient to have some sort of residence close to the fields that were being stripped, and the whole family would migrate to their property near Hatch Bay, where they must have camped in luxury, as Maud can remember her mother being angry with her father for insisting upon taking the best linen sheets with him.” (Young, Everild, pp.118)

It’s also along this long winding road, which weaves its way from Hatchet Bay to Gregory Town, that these pillars of history dramatically jut out against a blue sky. Representative of a time gone by, 1927 to be exact, the silos were a part of Austin Levy’s 2400-acre ‘Hatchet Bay Plantations’: a thriving dairy and poultry farm that supplied Nassau with much of its milk and eggs. Then the lonely silos stored feed for livestock. Now they stand silent, abandoned, and unused, and serve as a constant reminder of the disappointment mirrored by many hoteliers, developers and visionaries, all of whom are bound to Eleuthera by broken dreams.

All of whom have inspired me to continue to recognize the potential of the 110 mile island.