OUR VILLAGES AND COUNTRY PARTS. 
By Rey. J. B. Croppr 
In the early days the * plantation” with its proprietor or his 
representative and its staff of labourers and labour superintendents was 
all that represented rural life. After emancipation abandoned sugar and 
cotton plantations were bought by groups of liberated slaves who parted 
the land among themselves and settled down in communities. Work on 
the adjoining plantations and the growing on their own lands of plantains, 
cassava and other provisions maintained these communities in a large 
measure of prosperity. 
The plantation system of locating the residents in one section 
separated from the cultivable section was followed and each plot in 
the residential section had its corresponding plot in the cultivation 
section. As time went on and the whole of the empoldered lands became 
oecupied new areas were empoldered and plots allotted to the original 
residential lots. In most of the villages the divisions were not made by 
survey and the portions secured to each proprietor or family by title, 
deed or transport. A friendly arrangement seems to have sutticed for 
the marking off of the plots to be occupied by each family. In some 
parts, notably in Berbice, reef lands were chosen for the site of the 
“village ~ irrespective of its proximity or otherwise to the public road. 
In many eases no attempt was made to “lay out” the village, houses 
being erected anywhere about the section chosen for residence. In some 
instances—of later date than that of the early village settlement— 
abandoned plantations bought each one by more purchasers than one, or 
occupied by more than one family, descendants of the original—or of an 
earlier individual proprietor, have less of the village look about them. In 
comparatively recent years other forms of village settlement have arisen. 
Some of the proprietors of sugar plantations have sold out their front 
lands or portions of them in lots along the public road. These lots have 
no cultivation plots aback, being simply, as they are termed, house lots. 
Other proprietors have been themselves laying out their properties in lots 
and selling them to individual purchasers. In almost all, if not all, of 
such cases the land is divided lengthwise of the estate, the lots running 
in narrow strips from the seashore to the backdam, a convenient position 
for the erection of houses being found on each side of the public road 
which in every case intersects the estate. The Government also has done 
some experimenting incommunity forming, in some cases in the sub- 
dividing and selling out of estates which had fallen into their hands, and 
in a few others in an effort to settle time-expired East Indians. They 
have in their case reverted to the old plantation system of a village 
section in the front, the lots in which are not continued into the cultiva- 
tion lots aback. 
