By Mohamed Khan

THE tall brick chimney and boiler still stand in the Caricom Rice Mills Limited compound at Anna Regina, Essequibo Coast, marking the site where sugar workers once stood.The factory that stood there was owned by the Moss family in 1823, but the fine buildings with intricate brickwork that housed the aristocracy of that estate have all disappeared, together with the logies that once housed the workers. The whole place has now been transformed into a rice milling operation with silos, except that a few iron punts which were used to fetch the canes are still in the compound.

Behind the chimney of this Anna Regina rice-milling operation is a large area of fertile land which was once used to grow canes. It is now growing rice, but the drainage canals of that cane cultivation era remains. The state of Anna Regina is a standing example of how much development has taken place since 1823.

The sugar factory had a design with a water transport that ran straight out to the sea, at the end of which was a caisson sluice — an internal canal that was used for shipping. Barges from Georgetown would sail to the lock sluices under the Anna Regina high bridge, and float up to the factory, where the chimney stands, to deliver their cargo and take away produce of sugar stored in the bond. Because this factory had the finest machinery, it produced first-class yellow crystals in an output of 100 tonnes per week.

The factory was closed in 1936, following a decline in the sugar industry on the Essequibo Coast; and Mr Brodie, a Scotsman who was the last colonial manager on the estate, gave the Indian immigrants the drained cane fields to cultivate rice. His house and office had been in the building which the Anna Regina Municipality has occupied since it was established as a town in 1970.

This information was given to me by my father-in-law Karamchand Gamsundar, who was born in 1912 in a logie on the Thomas Edward Moss plantation at Anna Regina. He died at the age of 98.
He told me that his father Garib came on the ship Hesperus, which left Calcutta on January 29, 1938 and landed at Anna Regina on May 10 of that same year. He was one of the East Indian immigrants who worked on the sugar estate.

In his youth, my father-in-law worked as the stable boy, attending the mules and horses which were used to pull the laden cane punts from the backdam. After his mother and father died, he was left alone in a logie to fend for himself. Mr Brodie, the manager, rewarded him for good works on the plantation as the stable boy who drove the mules to pull the punts. He gave my father-in-law a plot of rice land and a house lot at Cotton Field, where he and his second wife lived until his death.

My father-in-law’s second marriage, to his wife Chandra, bore him four daughters. He had lived with his first wife in a logie next to the sugar estate, and she had borne him two sons. While delivering her third child, she died.

He told me that after the sugar estate disappeared, the system of lock sluice continued to operate, and barges from Georgetown would sail up to Anna Regina high bridge to deliver the merchants’ cargoes. Mr Pancham from Lima had a lorry that would then load the goods and distribute same to shop owners on the Essequibo Coast.

The first market was near this bridge, and hundreds of vendors displayed their goods, fruits and vegetables there on Mondays.