The History of Trelawny
The parish of Trelawny was named after Sir William Trelawney, the Governor in whose time the parish was separated (1770) from St. James.
The separation was effected because the Trelawny coastline and valleys were by 1770 pretty well settled. The rise of a seaport was therefore natural, and by the time of the Battle of Trafalgar town with the good Cornish name of Falmouth seemed likely to Rival Montego Bay.
No town in Jamaica except the older port of Kingston, is built on so regular a plan as Falmouth- that’s "gridiron" plan which the Greeks hit upon when the succesor of Alexander reigned in the East. Moreover the people of Trelawny did not spare expense for public purposes; they built a fine Court House and provided a Parish Church. When the slaves became chritians, the Baptist chapel at Falmouth associated with the name of Knibb the Liberator became a national monument-the only historic building which in recent times(after the 1944 hurricane) has been restored at the public expense Nowadays, although fallen from its former glory as a terminus of oceanic trade and living on nothing in the mysterious way peculiar to Jamaican outports, Falmouth could still not be mistaken for an ordinary outport. Poverty has not deprived of its self-respect: and with the smallest opportunity Falmouth would be a fine town again.
Sturge and Hervey, the Quakers,found Falmouth in 1837 "a town of increasing size and importance…..one of the most beautifu in the island." They found William Knibb finishing his new chapel, and a hundred children in a Baptist school on a piece of swamp land recently reclaimed. In 1860, when Jamaica was sadly decayed, the island’s Baptists in the period of emancipation. The fact that in spiteof the rebellion, riots, and chapel burnings, the sugar industry held its ground in the parish, seems evidence that Knibbs social policy was grossly misrepresented by his opponents.
Trelawny is today perhaps the most unspoiled or the least progressive parish, according to your point of view. Its whole rate of change has been slower: it changes, but very gradually.
Trelawny’s most famous sons seem to have taken early opportunities to leave their native parish, JOHN KENYON, for example, the friend of the Brownings, sprang from a local family of importance, and HERBERT GEORGE deLISSER, newspaper man and novelists, so prominent a figure in Jamaica between the World Wars. On the other hand some interesting characters chose to live in Trelawny.
BYRON EDWARDS the historian lived there for a time Brampton, and wrote there his history of the British West Indies in 1792.
Soon after the Napoleonic War, there arrived in Jamaica a DR.LEMONIUS who settled in Trelawny. Lemonius had taken part in an unsuccessful German rising, organised by the House of Brunswick, against Napoleon: he had ridden with his companions across Germany to the North Sea, was rescued in the nick of time by English warships from the victorious French, went to England and appears in Army list as an officer in the Regiment of the Duke of Brunswick-Oehis.His descendant are still with us in Jamaica.
Above all, there was WILLIAM KNIBB-the Baptist missionary whose birthplace (Kettering in Northants) has given its name to a place in Trelawny. It was Knibb who, after the rebellion of 1832, set to work with all his heart and soul to destroy slavery; it was Knibb too who secured for the Baptist Church a special place in the hearts of the emancipated slaves and their descendants by his bold advocacy of their social and economic rights after 1838. Consequently Falmouth is one of the few shrines of Jamaican Freedom, and Knibb is one of the few characters which remained fixed in popular memory.
Submitted by:
"Kcristien"
March, 2003
