
The original wooden house was here. This is where Samuel Jefferson II [ancestor of America’s third president lived! Maurice Widdowson says as we make a tour of the 17th-century grounds. Romney Manor may have been razed to the ground by a fire in1995, but there’s still much to see on its namesake estate that’s home to a unique batik workshop and boutique, fragrant botanical gardens and “rainforest” bar.
One of the island’s most visited sites, the estate earned owner Maurice Widdowson a Medal of Honor for his contribution to tourism in 2017. The Lancaster-born British expat and former retail manager called Zambia and St. Lucia home for decades before firmly burying his feet in Kittitian sands in the mid-1970s.
Widdowson describes Romney as being horribly run-down when he took over the eight-acre estate in 1975. It doesn’t take long for the rainforest to take over. Every fern and flower has been planted after 1975, he tells me like a proud father. Standing the test of time, not to mention hurricanes and infernos, are Romney’s mature trees, including a 400-year-old saman that Widdowson holds very dear to his heart. I find the tree almost spiritual. It has seen and heard so much, he says of the half-acre-spanning saman, adding I’m just the caretaker. The tree owns the place. To say the estate – renamed in the mid-17th century by Baron Romney of Britain has a storied past, is an understatement.
The village of a powerful Amerindian chief by the name of Tegreman once occupied the site, and over the course of its long history, Romney has had five family owners, including the great, great, great grandfather of Thomas Jefferson. Widdowson only came to know of the Jefferson connection 18 years ago thanks to a serendipitous encounter with a visitor who happened to be the descendent of America’s third president.
That was a life-defining moment, Widdowson says; it set him on a path to piece together the
untold history of Romney and neighboring Wingfield estate, which he also owns. Akin to a living museum that’s in a continual state of excavation, Wingfield was the island’s first sugar estate to emancipate its enslaved African workers. I researched and found that the first land grant written by the King of England was to Samuel Jefferson II in 1625. It was a lease for
1,000 acres for 1,000 years at five pounds a year!
A copy of Wingfield’s grant hangs on the wall of its rum shop gallery, which is surrounded by relics from the estate’s plantation past, including a perfectly preserved bell tower and the estate’s most recently unearthed treasure: a rum distillery. It was a humble red brick that gave rise to what Widdowson refers to as a life-changing excavation on the site in 2014. In October of 2013, I noticed [a brick on the surface of Wingfield’s roadway after a heavy storm, he tells me, adding about a week later, we had another storm, and it opened up another red brick at absolute right angles.” Three months later, archaeologists arrived and uncovered what is now known to be the oldest intact rum distillery in the Caribbean.
I love mysteries, and when you’re involved in archaeology it’s 90% mystery, and the rest is speculation, Widdowson says with a sparkle in his eyes, continuing, we can’t find any evidence of when production stopped or why it stopped, but we know for a fact that they were distilling in 1671. 2025 marks the 300th anniversary of Wingfield becoming the first land grant in the English West Indies and the purchase of Romney Manor by Samuel Jefferson II. That’s two good reasons to visit and toast the landmark year with their small batch Old Road rum, which is blended and bottled onsite.
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