Brampton Bryan

Brampton Bryan estate was a plantation in Trelawney, Jamaica, and our collections contain several engineering drawings for components for plantation machinery manufactured by an Aberdeen engineering firm called William McKinnon & Co. Ltd. This company which started in 1798, was based at the Spring Garden Iron Works in the city and produced machinery for sugar and coffee plantations amongst other industries. Blaikie Brothers, another Aberdeen engineering firm who similarly produced machinery for sugar plantations are also mentioned on the drawings as making the original equipment.

Brampton Bryan Estate, like many other sugar plantations in Jamaica had a legacy of slavery overseen by British plantation owners (at least one of the claimants of the compensation awarded to slaveowners following the abolition of slavery in Britain in the 1830s was Scottish: Alexander Grant of Aberlour). Ex-slaves were officially free in Jamaica in the 1890s when the drawings in our collection were produced but they were still bonded by servitude to a labour and social system that was ultimately restrictive and racist.