Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
History
When the Danes purchased St Croix from the French in 1733-34, the Danish governor Fre-
derick Moth designed Christiansted using Norway's picturesque town of Christiania (now
Oslo) as a model. The new town would take its name from the reigning Danish monarch,
Christian VI.
Moth drew up a town with a fort on its waterfront to protect the nearby commercial
buildings of the Danish West India and Guinea Company and a rectangular grid of streets
where the town was subdivided into building sites.
Thrilled with the development of the modern town and the burgeoning prosperity of their
garden isle, the Danes moved the capital of the Danish West Indies here from St Thomas in
1755, where it remained until 1871.
Many of the town's 18th-century buildings might have been lost to modernization if the
sugar industry had not gone into serious decline in the 1820s. As the island fell into eco-
nomic hard times, Christiansted settled into dormancy, and little changed here for almost
200 years.
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