Did your parent or grandparent attend Christiansted High School at the Old Barracks on Hospital Street, Christiansted between 1935 To 1955? Did any of them work at the Old Barracks in the 1960s through 2000s? If so, the Virgin Islands Architecture Center for Built Heritage and Crafts Inc. wants to hear and collect your family’s stories for the Christiansted Old Barracks Storytelling Project.
The Virgin Islands Architecture Center’s storytelling team is creating a multimedia presentation that tells the history of the 300-year-old structure in the heart of Christiansted, St. Croix, that has been the center of events of significance from the Danish colonial period to the early American and 20th Century period to the plans for its future into the 21st Century.
The center invites the general public to the VIAC Storytelling Project Community Collections Day set for 4-7 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 11, at the RTPark, 64 West Conference Room at the University of the Virgin Islands campus. Bring parents and grandparents, bring any memorabilia that you have from those times, so we can catalog and record them for our historical project.
Throughout the summer, the VIAC Storytelling Team of Monique Clendinen Watson, Monica Marin, Chalana Brown, Anurie Oliver and videographers Kevin Moolenaar and George Canon have been interviewing St. Croix elders who attended the Christiansted High School at the Old Barracks or who worked there at the Departments of Labor, Education and Public Safety.
The project is funded through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded by the Community Foundation of the Virgin Islands. The project includes educational outreach from the Virgin Islands Department of Education’s Division of Cultural Education to engage students in the intergenerational project.
On Nov. 11, the center will present a sneak peek of the project by sharing some of the interviews it has collected so far and then share those plans for the transformation of the Old Barracks Property into an educational center for historic preservation, architectural and building arts of the Virgin Islands and the Caribbean.
Virgin Islands Architecture Center will have some intergenerational activities with Virgin Islands students learning how to research, record and preserve history. It will also interview and honor Virgin Islands historian Karen Thurland for her published body of work that captures early and mid-20th Century life on St. Croix such as “Neighborhoods of Christiansted,” “Tradesmen of St. Croix” and “Masqueraders, Musicians and the Old Time Crucian Christmas Festival.”
For more information, contact info@viacstx.com. Virgin Islands Architecture Center is transforming our past into our future.
