Feb. 4, 2003 – The Port Authority has bulldozed a road through V.I. National Park property on Hassel Island to facilitate access to a proposed communication tower on Signal Hill, Park Superintendent John King said Tuesday.
Of Hassel Island's 135 acres, 133 belong to the park. The signal tower, battery and garrison house belong to the local government. Additionally, a few parcels with houses along the shore are privately owned.
King said the Port Authority has long held a right of way across the park property. It runs from a dock up to the top of Signal Hill. "I would prefer there not be any development, but they have a legal right to do it," he said.
However, while the road apparently is legal, the tower may not be. The entire island is zoned W-1, or Waterfront-Pleasure, and there is no provision for the erection of a tower in that designation, a knowledgeable government source said.
King said he hopes that the highly visible gash the bulldozing has left on the island's eastern slop will soften in time as vegetation alongside returns.
According to King, park officials convinced the Port Authority to make the road narrower than initially planned. He did not know the road's width.
He also said he hopes VIPA will heed the park's suggestion that it reduce the height of the proposed tower to 30 feet from the planned 90 feet.
King said that hiking up a rough trail that existed to the site was not a reasonable alternative to creating a road because the Port Authority needed to use trucks to move equipment.
The Friends of the V.I. Park group is in the midst of a project to clear brush that for decades has covered the historic Creque Marine Railway on the western side of Hassel Island.
The marine railway ruins include a slipway, tracks and a steam house located about 200 yards up from the slipway. The marine railway was built in 1840 to 1843. It was originally called the St. Thomas Marine Repair Slip. In 1910, it became the Creque Marine Railway. The operation went out of use in the 1960s and the property became part of the V.I. National Park in 1972.
Hassel Island was not always an island. It was part of St. Thomas until 1865, when a low-lying spit of land was cut to provide a channel for small boats and to improve the natural flow of water in the Charlotte Amalie harbor, where ships dumped their waste overboard.
Early Danish colonists called the island Estate Orkanhullet, a name that translates to Hurricane Hole. It came from the fact that ships took shelter on the east side of the spit during fierce storms.
Historical records show that Daniel and Adrian Jansen owned the property in the early 1700s, but the Hassel family owned Estate Orkanhullet from as early as 1802 until 1943. While the island took on its current name during this time, it wasn't until the early 1970s that official maps began to call it Hassel Island.
The island has a long history of ship repair. With St. Thomas a center of shipping commerce, there was a definite need for this type of activity. After 1801, the Hassel family began a small ship repair and chandlery in Careening Cove, on the island's east side.
In 1840, the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company received an exclusion from all crown and local shipping fees for passengers, mail and postal services. By 1843, the company had established a coaling depot, warehouse, machine shop, water catchment and storage tanks on the northeastern tip of Hassel Island.
After a hurricane in 1867 shattered Charlotte Amalie's image as a safe harbor and severely damaged the company's warehouses, the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company moved to Barbados, leaving behind the coaling depot on Hassel Island. Soon the Hamburg-America Line and the East Asiatic Company, among others, were using the island as a coaling depot. When the United States bought the Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917 for $25 million, the properties were seized as a war prize, and Hassel Island lost its economic importance.
The Hamburg America facilities, located on the south side of Careening Cove, were converted to a naval station which was used until 1931, and again during World War II, then was decommissioned in 1947.
The island has a long military history. In the late 1600s, the Danes built two earthen fortifications to guard the approach to the St. Thomas harbor. One, called Fort Willoughby, was on Hassel Island. The other was across the harbor on the mainland.
On March 6, 1801, as part of their occupation of the Danish West Indies during the Napoleonic War, six English frigates blockaded the Charlotte Amalie harbor. Danish soldiers on St. Thomas were taken prisoners or sent home; but after negotiations, the two powers agreed that St. Thomas would remain under Danish civilian rule with the British in charge of the military.
The British built two battery installations with guardhouses, two hospital buildings with two service buildings, five barracks for enlisted men, seven houses for married couples and petty officers, three storerooms, a casemented magazine, a cookhouse, a mess, two latrines and two free-standing cisterns. The work was carried out in 10 months.
In late 1807, war broke out between Denmark and England. St. Thomas again surrendered to the British, who then improved the Hassel Island fortifications. In 1815, at the end of the Napoleonic War, St. Thomas again returned to the control of Denmark, which left the remains of the British fortifications in place.
No one from the Port Authority returned a telephone call requesting comment.
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