Painful chapter in our history revisited

It’s among the pieces of Bermudian history that Professor Duncan L. McDowall (2nd picture) has researched meticulously.

Prof McDowall, a Canadian historian, published a lengthy piece for the ‘Bermuda’ magazine (published by Bermuda Media) in 1996 that chronicles how the mostly black community of Tucker’s Town turned into a white, affluent tourist destination in a series of land transactions and development deals between 1920 and 1923. A community was displaced — literally bought out and given new homes mostly located in Smith’s — homes were demolished, a golf course and country club were built.

The idea, he says, was to create an insular getaway that would draw wealthy tourists from America’s east coast, he writes in the piece: “The crown jewel of this colony within a colony would be a posh residential community where wealthy Americans could winter among their own kind,” wrote Prof McDowall: “No well-heeled American, the developers reasoned, was going to buy an expensive mid-Atlantic building lot if there was the slightest chance that their serenity might be troubled by Saturday night rum and chowder parties.”