History in the Sun
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Students focused much of their efforts on this well house made of stone, brick and coral, located on the Leinster Bay sugar plantation that is part of the more than 14,500-acre national park on St. John. In addition to the cane fields, the 18th-century plantation included the windmill-powered well, a horse-driven sugar cane mill, slave huts and a large hilltop house for the owners. At the well house, students cleared vegetation, measured walls, took photographs and downloaded data into a laptop computer to generate digital designs of the building. Their renderings preserve details about the structure for future historical analysis and restoration. Leinster plantation, built in 1721, operated for a century before the Caribbean sugar industry collapsed. Photo by Amy Crosby

Piracy and an economy based on slavery mark the history of the U.S. Virgin Islands, located at the shoulder of the West Indies just east of Puerto Rico. Named by Christopher Columbus, the islands had been under Spanish, French and Danish influence before being purchased by the United States from Denmark in 1917 for $25 million. Today, the 68 islands have U.S. territorial status.

Residents are U.S. citizens and elect a non-voting representative to Congress, but they cannot vote for president.

The 14,689-acre Virgin Islands National Park on St. John preserves cultural artifacts that include petroglyphs and other evidence of pre-Columbian native peoples. Starting in the early 18th century under Danish rule, sugar plantations fueled an economy based on African slave labor. For more than a century, the system generated wealth for owners, but slaves rebelled in 1733, 1818, 1840 and 1848, the year that Denmark abolished slavery.

Sugar plantations continued to operate after abolition. In 1867, a combination of devastating earthquakes and a severe hurricane caused extensive damage to the island's plantations, include the one at Leinster Bay. Sugar operations ceased, and during much of the 20th century, the area was used as a cattle farm.

Today, about 760,000 people visit the park annually, part of a tourism industry that accounts for the majority of the territory's annual revenues.