Feb 26 2021
Elizabeth Knight Britton’s grandfather James Knight owned a sugar plantation and a mahogany furniture factory near Matanzas, in Eastern Cuba, and she spent much of her childhood there. An account of this period written later by her sister, Mrs. David Oak, calls this “a happy childhood on the sugar estate – flowers, lots of birds, white and green peacocks shrieking, the cackle of guinea hens, a big fountain…” We have a sense, reading this letter, of idyllic times surrounded by beautiful nature. Mrs. David Oak wrote that it may have been this rosy childhood, in fact, that sparked Elizabeth Knight Britton’s passion for science more broadly – “I often wonder if Britton’s interest in ferns and mosses did not begin from our visits to the old well near Matanzas, with Father.”
Elizabeth Knight Britton was born in 1858, so slavery was still legal in Cuba when she visited. According to her sister, “on the estate we all had colored nurses,” and “Grandmother Knight, who managed the estate after Grandfather died, was one of the first to free her slaves, but most of the 60 negroes refused to leave.” Without examining the records for the plantation, it is difficult to prove or disprove this statement, but it should remind us that Britton’s idyllic childhood of flowers and peacocks was made possible by, at the very least, family wealth derived from many decades of slavery. Sugar was a labor intensive and dangerous crop to grow, and falling prices of sugar in the 1860s only increased the demands that plantation owners placed on enslaved laborers.
