Cheshire Hall Plantation

Who built it

Cheshire Hall was set up by Thomas Stubbs, encouraged by his brother Wade to leave England and develop a plantation on Blue Hills, modern day Providenciales. He divided his land into cotton and pastures to grow food for the owners, the enslaved people and the animals.

It was successful at first. Then Thomas fell on hard times, and in 1810 Wade Stubbs purchased the land from his brother.

⚠ What is left, and what that means

This is the part of the story that matters most, and the museum states it plainly: all that is really known, and left, is the main house and industrial compound.

The rest is gone. The slave quarters, burial sites, latrines and rubbish dumps have not been located and have probably been lost to development.

Read those two sentences together. The building where the owner lived is standing. The places where the enslaved people slept, and the ground where they were buried, cannot be found. A visitor walking the site is walking an incomplete record, and the part that is missing is the part that held most of the people.

Why it is disappearing

The site's accessibility is also its problem. It sits at the heart of Providenciales and has been consistently encroached upon by development. As recently as the end of 1999 a new structure was found on a nearby hill, and it was found only because a government complex was proposed to expand there.

The museum's own position is that Cheshire Hall should be treated as an example of what development can do, and that plantation sites on the other islands need better protection, or at least better interpretation and understanding, before they are put at risk.

The voice the site does not have

No first hand account survives from the people held at Cheshire Hall. One does survive from these islands: Mary Prince's narrative, which records life in the salt ponds on Grand Turk. Our diaspora guide takes that up, and it is the closest thing to a voice from inside this history that the territory holds.

Visiting

The site is on Providenciales and is the most reachable of the territory's plantation sites. Arrangements for access and interpretation belong to the Turks and Caicos National Museum, which is not a government department and receives no regular support from the Government. Check current arrangements with the museum before you go.

The Turks and Caicos has no World Heritage designation of any kind, so nothing here is protected by that mechanism. What protection exists is local, and the museum is not persuaded it is enough.

Sources

• Turks and Caicos National Museum: Cheshire Hall Plantation: Thomas Stubbs left England to develop a plantation on Blue Hills, modern day Providenciales, divided the land into cotton and pastures, and in 1810 his brother Wade Stubbs purchased it from him. Accessed 18 September 2026.
• Turks and Caicos National Museum: The territory national museum, which states that it is not a part of the Turks and Caicos Islands Government and receives no regular support from it. Accessed 18 September 2026.
• Turks and Caicos National Museum: Mary Prince: the record that a first hand account of the treatment and experiences of a slave exists for Grand Turk, transcribed by Thomas Pringle and published in England in 1831 as part of the Abolitionist movement, giving an insight into life as a slave in the salt ponds, and that Mary was born into slavery in Bermuda. Accessed 18 September 2026.
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre: United Kingdom States Party record. The Turks and Caicos Islands appears nowhere on it: not among the inscribed properties and not on the tentative list, which is the inventory of properties a State Party intends to consider for nomination. Accessed 18 September 2026.