Who could have imagined that a naturally occurring tar pit could lead to robber baron trusts and government make work. Well perhaps if the warnings from the Indians had been heeded. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
This King George VI standard design has one of those marvelous little windows into the specific colony. Here we see the white man’s discovery of a lake of asphalt by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1595. Soon Raleigh was using it as calk on his ships and comparing and contrasting Trinidad’s lake to a tar pit he had previously seen in Norway. With the knowledge he added, we should remember to refer to him as Sir as the honour was much deserved.
Todays stamp is issue A13, a 6 Pence stamp issued by the British Crown Colony of Trinidad and Tobago in 1938. It was a 14 stamp issue in various denomination with different windows into the colony. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 85 cents with it’s nice G. P. O. Port of Spain postage cancelation.
The asphalt lake had of course been discovered by Indians long before Sir Walter Raleigh. The legend they used to explain it was that long ago a tribe was celebrating a defeat in battle of a neighboring rival. In their exuberance the tribe got the munchies and cooked and ate a sacred hummingbird that they believed contained the eternal souls of their ancestors. Out of revenge, their winged god caused the earth to open up and swallow their village with the black hell lava. The lava/asphalt then stained the earth permanently as a warning to future munchy Indians. Scientists now boringly claim that the location is where two tectonic plates meet forcing to the surface a deep deposit of asphalt.
In Washington DC, a white Philosophy Professor at Howard University named Amzi Barber was branching out into upscale residential neighborhood development. He developed Ledroit Park adjacent to traditionally black Howard University as a gated, tree lined, all white community. In the course of his work, he came upon a government report recommending asphalt as the best material for paving roadways. Barber chartered a stock company in London that acquired the monopoly on mining asphalt at the lake in Trinidad. He made over 35 million in 1890s American dollars doing paving work in 70 American cities with asphalt from Trinidad. His company was later labeled an overcharging illegal trust and broken up. Howard University also rose up against Barber’s way of doing things and in 1888 students from Howard tore down the gates to the Ledroit neighborhood. After that the quite handsome neighborhood gradually became home for Washington DC’s black elite including Ralph Bunche, Duke Ellington, and Jesse Jackson.
In the early 1970s the asphalt from the mine was mainly going to the UK. However they decided to switch to coal tar for road paving. In 1978 the Trinidad & Tobago government took over the mine so it could continue despite loses. The area has grown in recent years as a tourist attraction.
Well my drink is empty and today we are not supposed to celebrate mythical winged gods, colonial explorers, or redlining developers. I want to celebrate them all. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.