History of Cunupia

CUNUPIA

The word “Cunupia” is almost certainly a corruption by the Spaniards of a native Arawak word, and at the time it emerged it applied to a roadway, the Conupia Road, which formed a junction with the Chaguanas tramway road — which became part of the Southern Main Road. Although this tramline was laid down by William Eccles in 1856 it was only in the 1870s it became important, running from a mangrove-wharf on the coast of Felicité sugar estate to a convict depôt at Longdenville, a depôt established by Governor J.R. Longden. Afterwards, the road linked up with a royal road on the bank of the River Caroni.

The stretch of the Conupia Road lay across the Caroni savanna and was very much prone to flooding and swamp. The road was built some time after Lord Harris established Counties and Wards in 1849, thus setting the scene for the opening of sugar estates in that region.

It was decades later that the village of Cunupia appeared on this road. For example, the elaborate ordnance survey and estate map of 1871 shows no village such as Cunupia. As early as 1853 we notice a Constable Ames George watching over the Cunupia area, and that a cutlass man called St. Hilaire Bonair had the job of cleaning the Caroni Savanna Road. Unless this was the same “Conupia Road,” then the Conupia Road was not recognized.

Change came fast in the 1870s when a bid to extend cocoa plantations brought the crop into this area giving rise to the little settlement of “Cunupia” that we know today. But even so, up to 1883, no village called “Cunupia” was recognized by maps, although it doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. At this time, the whole Ward of Lower Caroni had little more than a thousand people.

A group of Africans on the Conupia Road seems to have been the cause of the building of an Anglican chapel in Cunupia in 1884, and shortly afterwards a chapel school was established as the first school in this district. The Catholics in the settlement had to wait five more years. Their first Catholic chapel was erected in 1889, and following this came the first school for Catholic children.

It was around that very period that East Indian workers from the sugar estate on the banks of the Caroni, came to Cunupia. Incidentally the estate was called Caroni, and had its little sugar mill, even making its own Caroni rum. These people who had moved away from the sugar-cane estate seemed to have been attracted by the swampy areas in the Cunupia region, no doubt seeing the opportunity to plant rice. They settled in a place that came to be called Alligator Village, on the borders of the Cunupia cocoa plantations.

In order to educate the children of these East Indians, the Canadian Mission to the Indians opened a school here in 1895. Yet Cunupia must have been very small, for the three schools together could not muster 100 children.

The year 1898 woke up Cunupia when from a point called Cunupia Farm the authorities, who had extended its railway system to San Fernando in 1882, decided to send a line through the Caparo Valley to Tabaquite to assist the cocoa planters. The railway station at Cunupia was called Jerningham Junction — for the governor of the day, Sir Hubert Jerningham.

By the end of the century Cunupia was not only a recognized village but a prosperous one.

In the 1920s this area grew very fast. Alligator Village was now the heart of the district and grew from 549 in 1921 to just over 1,000 in 1931. In that very year, 1931, the government built its own school to house all the children and shut down the others.

Prosperous Cunupia declined in importance when the railway line from Jerningham Junction to Tabaquite was closed in 1965. In the 1980s it further declined because that era meant the end of all industries. The youth of Cunupia, shunning agriculture, as is the trend, find jobs away from home — in Chaguanas, Curepe, St Joseph, Arima, everywhere else but in the village of alligators, or near the old Cunupia Farm, where their fathers rode the train from Jerningham Junction, or where their grand-fathers worked in the sugar mill on the Caroni river.

Copyright NALIS, 2008