Headquarters House: histories of architecture and enslavement in Jamaica

A new blog by Dr Zakiya McKenzie, Programme Manager, RISE and Senior Research Associate, Plants, Enslavement and Public History project.

Last summer I visited Jamaica for a research trip to better understand the connections between enslavement and national heritage sites across the island. At 79 Duke Street in Kingston stands Headquarters House, the administrative home of the Jamaica National Heritage Trust (JNHT). Here I was hosted by Jamaica’s RISE representative, Lorna Bailey (Director of Public Education, Public Relations and Communications, JNHT) and Georgia Rookwood, JNHT’s Senior Research Officer. 

I was also given a comprehensive tour of Headquarters House by Curator of Artefacts, Ann-Marie Howard-Brown, and Tour Guide, Tiana Fung.  From basement cellar to inner courtyard, to the crow’s nest in the attic, my guides narrated a rich history of Jamaica through the story of Headquarters House. 

Once known as Hibbert House, the building represents a material link between the architectural and economic structures of Jamaica’s colonial past. 
 
Constructed in 1755 by Thomas Hibbert, it is one of the earliest complete examples of Georgian architecture in the Caribbean region. Hibbert was born into a wealthy Lancashire family of cotton merchants who were no strangers to the Americas since their textiles widely circulated Atlantic trade ports.

Still, Thomas Hibbert was the first of his family to move to Jamaica, arriving in 1734. He quickly rose to the top of Kingston’s commercial and social elite, establishing the Hibbert name as one of the foremost in West Indian merchant families.

With business partner Nathaniel Sprigg, Thomas Hibbert supplied Jamaican plantations with tens of thousands of enslaved people, working as middlemen known as ‘slave factors’. At Kingston port, Hibbert and Sprigg boarded just-landed slave ships and bought captured African passengers before their feet even touched the Jamaican shore. Slave factors then resold the enslaved people to plantation owners across the island.

With the success of business, Thomas Hibbert decided to build a Kingston townhouse overlooking the downtown commercial district and the harbour. Some legends claim that the house was built in a bid to win a bet with three other merchants on who could build the finest residence in Kingston.

With its tray-vaulted ceiling and mahogany floors and stairs throughout the whole house, Hibbert’s residence was a modern beauty to Jamaica’s slaving social circles. 

In the attic, remnants of an internal rainwater harvesting system as well shelving and partitions point to it being a well-used and functional space. A widow’s walk and crow’s nest on this uppermost floor allowed Hibbert to survey slave ships coming in and out of the port. 

In 1792, the Jamaican Assembly ordered the sale of enslaved people be moved from ship to shore. The Hibbert family took this opportunity and began holding and conducting the auction of those who survived the arduous and abusive journey from Africa, at Hibbert House.

The basement of house was altered by Hibbert’s nephew George to house a dungeon jail for their captures. It is not an exaggeration to say that thousands of enslaved Jamaican ancestors spent their first days and nights in the island at Hibbert’s residence at the corner of Duke and Beeston Streets in Kingston. 

It is a sweet repurposing to me, that the building is now home to JNHT – the organisation tasked with preserving and presenting Jamaica’s cultural history.

Thomas Hibbert did not legally marry, but he cohabited with and fathered three daughters with the ‘free, mulatto housekeeper’ who lived in a property beside the main house. Her name was Charity Harry and she was the subject of a private act of the Jamaican Assembly in 1775 which granted her the same rights as white Englishwomen, except for voting and holding office.

It was not uncommon for the mixed-race children of Englishmen to be the beneficiary of such ‘private’ laws in Jamaica at the time; the historical record shows that the racial and social strata was often muddled or disregarded to accommodate the technically illegal, and sometimes, conjugal relationships of the enslaver-merchant class and women of African descent. There is no record yet found that speaks to whether Harry consented in the relationship with Hibbert, but we do know that Charity Harry inherited land and slaves upon his death.

Even as non-white, woman and having had no sons (heirs) for Thomas Hibbert, she maintained her wealth and continued to be a part of Jamaica’s social elite.  

One of Harry and Hibbert’s daughters did not survive early childhood. Charity Harry was born in 1755 – the same year Hibbert House was completed.

In 1771, the two remaining daughters were sent to live in England to be educated under the care of Nathaniel Sprigg. When her sister Margaret died at boarding school, Jane Harry sought comfort infriend, Mary Morris Knowles. 

Mary was from a well-respected Quaker family whose influence on Jane grew until she embraced the religion herself. She may have been turned away from the Sprigg household upon joining to the abolitionist sect, but what we know is that she soon left the Sprigg’s and became a vocal anti-slavery activist.

With first-hand knowledge of the horrors of slavery from her childhood at Hibbert House, Jane vowed to return to Jamaica to free her mother’s slaves. Though she never crossed the sea back to the place of her birth, and did not convince her mother to free her enslaved, Jane Harry Thresher spent the rest of her life advocating for an end to the slave trade and British slavery itself. She died in 1784.

Though no named artworks of hers remain, Jane Harry Thresher is also remembered as a celebrated painter, winning an award from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts and Commerce in 1775.  

 

Meanwhile, Thomas Hibbert became involved in politics and was named Speaker of the Jamaica House of Assembly in 1756. Hibbert’s influence extended beyond Jamaica; in 1772–1773, he contributed £50 to Dr John Morgan’s fundraising tour of the West Indies in support of the University of Pennsylvania.

Headquarters House later served as the official seat of the Jamaican Legislature from 1872 to 1960, before the government relocated to Gordon House a few doors away where parliament still meets today. 

Headquarters House retains much of its original interior and today it also home to the piano used in the composition of the Jamaican national anthem. The building was also featured on the now-discontinued five-dollar Jamaican banknote following restoration in 1982. 

Today, as the administrative home of the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, the building stands as both survivor and witness – a monument that embodies resilience and pride, countering the enduring memory of a violent past. 

Crawford, Edward, ‘Individuals of Part-African or African Descent Named in Acts of the Jamaican Assembly 1760-1810’, Rootsweb Online, 15 August 2022  

Donington, Katie, ‘The Bonds of Family: Slavery, Commerce and Culture in the British Atlantic World’, in The Bonds of Family (Manchester University Press, 2019)  

Jones, Cecily, and Amar Nahab, ‘Free at Last? Reflections on Freedom and the Abolition of the British Transatlantic Slave Trade’ (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011) 

Nelson, Louis P. ‘Architecture and Empire in Jamaica’ (Yale University Press, 2016)  

Patricia E. Green Architects – ‘Jamaica: Hibbert House /Headquarters House’, n.d.