Preview the beginning of Chapter 1 and/or Chapter 5 below:

History of Abaco:

Chapter 1, Origins and Land, Page 1
     Two hundred million years ago the Bahama Islands did not exist, and all the present continents were part of the supercontinent Pangaea, which was surrounded by one great ocean. Pangaea rifted, or split, and North and South America moved westward from Eurasia and Africa creating the North and South Atlantic Oceans as they narrowed the ancestral Pacific (see maps at left). This movement of the continental plates was caused by the upwelling of new material from the interior of the earth which pushed the plates apart and created the mid-Atlantic ridges in the process. These ridges serve as evidence to support the plate or continental drift theory, and, when combined with other evidence, such as the amazingly close jigsaw puzzle fit of Northwest Africa with the east coast of North America, the argument is very convincing. Tectonic plate theory, regarded as a radical unsubstantiated idea as little as forty years ago, is generally accepted today.

    Geologists now see the earth and its land masses as dynamic and evolving rather than static. When Pangaea rifted the continental land masses moved apart at the rate of about ten kilometers every one million years, or ten inches every twenty-five years-about the speed of the growth of a toenail. It took two hundred million years to create the Atlantic Ocean, and the enlargement of the Atlantic continues today, making it slightly wider each year. As the North American plate moves west it crunches and grates against the Pacific plate, causing a crumpling of the western edge of the North American plate which has resulted in mountains there. Also, as one plate pushes up against the other great tensions are built up which are periodically relieved as the earthquakes which occur from time to time in California. Tectonic plate theory not only provided a satisfactory explanation of the evolution of the earth, it also offered consistent and logical explanations for various existing phenomena. But the Bahamas presented a problem for tectonic plate theorists.

 

 

 

Chapter 5, The Twentieth Century, Page 78

    There was one place in Abaco where the twentieth century came on time.  It was not Hope Town or New Plymouth or Cooperstown or Marsh Harbour -- it was Wilson City.  Named after Governor Sir William Grey-Wilson, Wilson City was on Spencer's Point not far from the old settlement of Sweeting's Village.  Wilson City was a company lumber town built by the Bahamas Timber Company, a United States corporation which had acquired a 100-year timber license to cut the pine forests of Abaco, Andros, and Grand Bahama Islands.

    Wilson City was a marvel in its time.  Its heart was a modern saw mill operation and a huge steam derrick and a railroad to load and carry felled timber to the mill.  Most of the lumber was shipped to Cuba, although some went to Nassau and some to the United States.  Next to the saw mill the Bahamas Timber Company built a town to provide housing for workers and managers.  All houses were supplied with electricity, and an ice plant produced as much as 1200 25- pound blocks of ice per day.  Wilson City, Abaco had electricity in 1908, the same year electrical service was initiated in Nassau.  The company also built a store, and supplied it with an amazing array of goods from the United States unobtainable anywhere else in the Out Islands of the Bahamas.  And Abaco's first tennis court was built in Wilson City.  It must have seemed a miracle to Abaconians--a modern industry from the United States was building a state-of-the-art facility and community in their previously isolated corner of the world.  They were to become part of the successful United States industrial revolution, be paid regular wages for regular work, receive some fringe benefits, and, in general, become part of the modern world.

    Workers were attracted to Wilson City from all over Abaco.  A commissioner in Hope Town expressed concern that his district would be depopulated because of migration to Wilson City, and men from as far away as New Plymouth took jobs there....