By Island Mike
I’ve found that if you want something done right, let others do it for you while you yell at them.
That’s more or less how I ended up moving from Cleveland, Ohio to St. Thomas. Going from practicing law to becoming Island Mike and officiating 3,000 weddings on the beach. To now owning a 200-year-old slave house and turning it into a rum distillery. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
You are either about to arrive or you are pulling in right now to Charlotte Amalie Harbour in St. Thomas. You’ve got between 6 and 8 hours in port. You may have heard from other passengers or the cruise director on the best things to do. You probably heard about Magens Bay or Mountaintop or Havensight. You may even have thought about doing an island tour. What better way to see the island, right? Ordinarily these are all awesome choices. But…
…here’s something better.
Old Town in St. Thomas is known as Charlotte Amalie or the Historic District. If you ask around you’ll probably hear that the shopping is cool. Maybe that’s your thing. But there is so much more to this little slice of paradise than jewelry and souvenir shops. We also have old, historic landmarks and sites – a fort, old churches, gardens, and one of the most unique and special properties in all the Caribbean. At least according to me.
One block off Main Street (where all the shops are) there is a building that has been standing since well before the United States Civil War – when sailing ships ruled the seas and when enslaved people and other unfortunates worked the fields to grow and harvest sugarcane.
You could walk past it without a second glance. But if you miss it, you missed the very essence of the island.
Pour a stiff one, class is in session.
My Story (since I’m the star)
I came to St. Thomas for a job. It was supposed to last 2 years. That was 16 years ago.
For most of my first 10 years on island I didn’t think or look much beyond the offensively blue ocean. I fished, swam, drank, boated and did all the beach bum activities. I performed thousands of weddings on every stretch of sand on the island. But it wasn’t until Covid that I started to turn my attention to other parts of the island.
Weddings had basically dried up at the start of Covid so my wife and I looked for other projects. We looked at real estate. We and apparently every other person in the universe. After looking at every property on island and making offers on many of them, we couldn’t find a single property that we wanted or could afford. That is, until I visited one of the ugliest, filthiest properties available. It was a dump, in disrepair and not remotely attractive to any sane investor. But maybe it was the rum or I’m just an idiot, but my wife and I bought it. And that has taken us on one of the most thrilling and daunting and enlightening and fulfilling projects imaginable. (And through it all I think my wife and I only threatened each other with divorce 2 or 3 times.)
The property we’re talking about is at 13 Wimmelskafts Gade. Which is a Danish street name, because this entire island was Danish for 250 years — a fact that blows people’s minds every single time and which we don’t have time to get into fully right now but trust me it’s wild. Locals call it Back Street. One block behind the jewelry shops and the obnoxious street barkers.
The address is 13W. That’s what everyone calls it. Or 3 Queens Distillery. Or The Slave House. How about Island Mike’s Place or The Black Hole Money Pit (a play on words since many black people once lived here).
What 13W Actually Is
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about Caribbean history: most of it happened in coastal towns. In buildings. Real buildings, still standing, that you can walk into and touch. Not behind glass in a museum. Not in a textbook. But in a courtyard, next to a brick oven, where someone cooked dinner every single night for generations. Inside walls where people suffered and cried and laughed and foomped and died.
13W was the slave quarters for one of the wealthiest merchant estates in Charlotte Amalie. The main house — owned by the Lange family, wealthy traders — is the grand dame of a building you walked past on Main Street. It’s the one that looks like it should have a string quartet in the lobby. Currently, it’s being managed by the Virgin Islands Government. Which is a tragedy I won’t get started on today.
The slave quarters are around back. Formerly part of the grand estate, but now separated by a road from it’s former master. 13W is a low, single-story U-shaped building — the kind where you almost feel like you have to duck walking in. And inside that U is a courtyard with a double brick oven. A saltwater well. Individual rooms, each with its own door opening onto the courtyard, for 10-15 people who lived here. And they weren’t there voluntarily.
Now here’s what I believe about those people, and I feel strongly about it:
They lived full lives. Not the lives they may have dreamed of or wanted, but they made do with what they had. They found joy where they could find joy. The found laughter and they found love and every other human emotion. That’s what I want to remember and imagine. Not the pain and suffering.
I know that’s not what we hear about enslaved peoples. But not every moment in these walls were sorrowful and agonizing. When you visit the courtyard at 13W, know they were sitting around in the evening around a fire cooking. They sat together and talked. Music. Singing. Friendships. Arguments. Inside jokes. Somebody who burned the rice every time and somebody else who never let them forget it. These were human beings living full human lives inside circumstances that were often difficult. And this building saw all of it.
What You’ll See at 13W
The walls of 13W are what’s called rubble construction — built from whatever useful materials were available: brick, rock, shells. The mortar holding it all together is a wild mixture of molasses, horse hair, and lime. Visitors have been known to lick the walls because apparently you can taste faint sweet notes of the molasses.
I can neither confirm nor deny this information so I’m not telling you to lick the walls. I’m just telling you that people have done it.
The ceilings were built without a single fastener (no nails, screws or adhesive). Just wood joints fitted together by hand, so expertly that they’re still holding after two centuries. The builders were the enslaved people themselves, trained by European tradesmen in carpentry and masonry.
In some of the door frames and window frames you’ll notice bricks. Those yellow bricks were fired in Flensburg, Germany — then under Danish rule — loaded onto trading ships as ballast for the Atlantic crossing, and offloaded here in Charlotte Amalie so the ships could load up with rum for the return trip. Flensburg, by the way, was nicknamed “The Rum City.” Two hundred rum refineries, all processing Caribbean rum shipped back from this harbor. They’ve been in those doorframes ever since they were placed in that molasses mortar 200 years ago.
The bricks crossed the ocean because of rum. St. Thomas was providing both rum and molasses that would then return to fuel the rum economy in Flensburg. I love this elegant and beautiful system.
Oh, and the double brick oven in the courtyard? As far as anyone can tell, it’s the only one of its kind in all of the Caribbean and possibly the world. Just sitting there. These are the 2 ovens that fed several generations of Africans. And now they sit idle waiting for someone to fire them back up.
The Part Where the Building Almost Died
At some point after emancipation in 1848 in the Virgin Island (way to go Denmark for being one of the first European powers to end slavery in its colonies) 13W was separated from the main estate when a road was cut through the property. The structure was still being used as a servant’s quarters (same people doing the same work but now given the title of “Freed Person”.).
In the early 1900’s the house was sold and the new owners no longer needed the servant’s quarters so the building was turned into a separate residence. And then as time went on 13W became various commercial enterprises including a sporting goods store, a daycare, a nursing school, government offices and eventually a beauty salon.
With each successive occupant the structure eroded and turned into a progressively worse eyesore.
By 2020 the roof had small trees growing out of it. A massive palm had grown into one of the walls. Rats were the primary tenants. The whole thing was held together by those German bricks and, apparently, sheer stubbornness.
My wife Amber and I bought it.
People thought we were insane. They were not entirely wrong.
We restored it brick by brick, stone by stone — saving almost every original piece of material — with support from the USVI Historic Preservation office and a quantity of stubbornness that I remain proud of. We found the double brick oven intact. The saltwater well still works. The Flensburg bricks in the doorframes? Not a scratch.
And then I bought a rum distillery, because that’s just how things go down here.
(Slightly longer version: I was shopping for old barrels to decorate the space. Asked a buddy who owned a distillery if he had any spares. His exact words were: “yeah you can have a couple of barrels, or you can have all 120 of them.” Turns out he was looking to get out of the business. Thirty days later I was the proud owner of 120 rum barrels, two stills, and several thousand gallons of aged rum. The island provides.)
What’s Here Now
Today at 13W you’ll find a small-batch distillery making rum, gin, and vodka — all of it made, aged, and sold right here. We’re the only spirits in the Virgin Islands actually produced on-island. The stuff you’ll find everywhere else was made somewhere else.
You’ll also find a museum with an impressive collection of artifacts: old maps, coins, authentic documents, and original artwork by Camille Pissarro, the father of Impressionism, who was born and raised about 200 feet from where you’re standing. There’s a tropical garden. A courtyard with that brick oven. That well.
There are also rum balls, but that’s a whole other conversation.
Why You Should Walk Through That Door
You’re about to spend six hours in one of the most historically significant ports in the Western hemisphere. This harbor has been the center of global trade, the crossroads of empires, the place where Danish and American and Sephardic Jewish and French and German merchants all operated simultaneously on the same block while, as Alexander Hamilton once observed, gold moved through the streets in wheelbarrows.
And one block away from that street, there is a 200-year-old courtyard with a one-of-a-kind brick oven, a working saltwater well, yellow Flensburg bricks in the doorframes, and rum aging in barrels where rum has been made for two centuries.
Come taste it.
We’re at 13 Wimmelskafts Gade — Back Street — one block from Main Street, five minutes from Fort Christian. If you get lost, ask anyone where the old slave house is. Everyone knows the one.
The oven’s been here for 200 years. We’ll leave the light on.
— Island Mike
Book a distillery tour or walking tour through Blue Mango Tours. Tasting room open daily at 3queensdistillery.com.