Rose Hall Great House

Rose Hall is a Jamaican Georgian plantation house on a hillside near Montego Bay, with a wide view over the coast. It is built in Jamaican Georgian style, with a stone base and a plastered upper storey, and many people call it the most famous great house in Jamaica. A great house was the main home of a plantation, the large farm where sugar cane was grown.

The house was built in the 1770s, lost its roof and floors over time, and had fallen into ruins by the 1960s. It was then restored and is now a historic house museum. The museum shows the grand rooms of the 18th century and tells the history of the enslaved people who lived and worked on the estate. Rose Hall is also known for the legend of the White Witch, a ghost story about Annie Palmer.

Who owned Rose Hall

The land was bought by Henry Fanning in 1742 for 3,000 pounds, and it was then called "True Friendship". Fanning married Rosa Kelly but died soon afterwards. His widow later married George Ash, who carried out the plan to build the house, which cost about 30,000 pounds. Rosa married twice more, the last time to John Palmer in 1767. After he died in 1797, the property passed through the Palmer family, and in 1820 John Rose Palmer married Anne Mary Patterson.

Life on the estate

By the early 1800s the Rose Hall estate had about 650 acres of sugar cane, grass and pasture, with more than 270 cattle. The neighbouring Palmyra estate, of about 1,250 acres, housed about 250 enslaved Africans. These people did the work that made the owners rich. Today the museum treats their story as an important part of the house, because a great house cannot be understood without the people who were forced to work around it.

Rebuilding and the legend

The house was restored to its former splendour in the 1960s, with mahogany floors, panelling and wooden ceilings. In 1977 it was bought by John Rollins and his wife Michele, who refurbished it with period furniture and set up the tour. According to the legend, a white witch called Annie Palmer murdered three husbands and still haunts the house. An investigation of the legend in 2007 concluded that the story was fictionalised, so it is best read as a ghost tale rather than as history.

On the globe

The model shows the grand Georgian mansion above the coast. Look at the symmetrical front and its stairs.