Towns and Villages-Arima pt 2

By MICHAEL ANTHONY

However, after Woodford died in 1828, the jolly Amerindian days were over, and Arima was not preserved as a mission. The Governors who came immediately after Woodford - Lewis Grant in 1829 and George Fitzgerald Hill in 1833 - did not seem to care about Spanish-founded missions, which in fact were missions for converting the Amerindians to the Catholic faith, a faith which the British did not profess. In any case these were the years just before the end of slavery, and the Governors mentioned were much too busy making preparations for that crucial period.

And in fact it was in the year 1837, the year before slavery was abolished, that Arima came into the news again. Soldiers led by the giant African, Daaga, attempted the first black insurrection in Trinidad when they mutinied at St. Joseph. They were unsuccessful, and fleeing eastwards along the main road, some were caught at Arima in a drama that nearly led to bloodshed.

The earliest pictorial view that we have of Arima came a little later when the water-colour artist, Jean-Michel Cazabon, visited this village with paint, canvas and brush. Setting up his easel on what today is called Calvary Hill, he seemed to have been more interested in capturing Mount Tamana, which rose out of the mist and the panoramic sweep in front of him, than in the village of Arima itself. Yet there is a glimpse of the tiny village below, with the Mission church surrounded by houses and forest trees.

By the 1850s, Arima, because of its strategic position, had grown sufficiently large to be regarded as one of the key villages in Trinidad. Proof of this was that a postal service was inaugurated here in 1851, the very year that such a scheme was introduced in Trinidad. Not only was this so but in 1851 Arima received one of the first of the ward schools established that year under Lord Harris' education scheme. There was already a carriage road leading from Arima to Port of Spain, and Lewis Inniss, the author of Trinidad and Trinidadians, tells in that book how, on setting off for Mayaro in 1860, he traveled by horse and carriage up to Arima, but had to make the rest of the way through a forest track to get to the East Coast. Lewis, then eleven years old, was on his way to see his school-master father at Mayaro.

Being on the subject of schools, it is only fair to point out that while Arima had what was among the earliest of ward schools, it by no means had the best. For when Patrick Keenan, a British official, was sent to Trinidad to report on schools here he was highly critical of the school at Arima. In his report, Keenan said of its head-teacher, who was at the time, George Cezair: "Solicitous about affairs not connected with his school duties; engaged in extensive correspondence with Ward schoolmasters to petition the Governor for an increase of their salaries."

The 1870s brought a transformation such as Arima had never known before. The cocoa industry had begun to spread into the central regions of Trinidad, and planters had begun to clamour for some system of transportation to get their goods into Port of Spain. And so it was on Santa Rosa Day, Thursday August 31, 1876, that Arima saw the inauguration of the first railway line in Trinidad for passenger and freight. That historic railway trip from railway headquarters in Port of Spain to the terminus at Arima, was greeted with jubilation and cheering all along its course.

And it is good to watch Arima at that juncture or better still, at a point a few years later, for at this time there are ready statistics. When Cazabon gave us a glimpse of Arima in the 1840s its population was nothing to speak of, but by the year 1881 the settlement had 1,973 people. Arima was not just a village then. The area was created a ward when Lord Harris established counties and wards in 1849. In 1881 the Ward of Arima had six policemen, and there were 58 persons in the category of shop-keepers and hucksters. Cocoa was of course its chief agricultural crop, and to testify to its influence, there were 1,826 agricultural labourers. Also by this time, 1881, the ward school of George Cezair had given way to two Government schools - the Arima Boys' Government School and the Arima Girls' Government School. Incidentally, it was Patrick Keenan who, in his report, had suggested that the schools be taken away from the Wardens and put in the charge of the Central Government.

Even at that stage, 1881, Arima was the most easterly of the inland villages, and the carriage road that Lewis Inniss had traveled along in 1860 still ended there. People going further east had to start walking from here as the boy Lewis had done more than 20 years before. But now the track leading out of it was a well-beaten one, for soldier-settlements at Manzanilla, established in 1821, had grown.

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