US Virgin Islands history, from the Danish Virgin Islands to today

Why is it called the Virgin Islands?

The name is Columbus's. On his second voyage, in 1493, he reached St. Croix and sailed past St. John, which he grouped with the islands he called the Eleven Thousand Virgins, according to the National Park Service's St. John timeline. The "Danish" came later, with the flag.

Denmark's own name for the colony was the Danish West Indies. King Christian V chartered the Danish West India Company on March 11, 1671, and the company's ship Fero raised the Danish flag in St. Thomas harbor on May 26, 1672, per the park. The National Archives dates the company's government of the islands from 1672 to 1754 and the Danish Crown's from 1754 to 1917. For nearly 250 years, then, the Danish Virgin Islands were a company venture and a royal colony, and until 1848 the people who did most of the work were enslaved.

The Danish Virgin Islands in one timeline

Every date below is the authority's own, read on October 9, 2026.

How sugar estates covered St. John

St. John was cut into plantations within ten years of the Danish landing. By 1726 the island had 20 sugar works, one of them the company's, and by 1728 most of the timber was gone and about 109 estates covered it, from 6.5 acres at Cruz Bay to 462 at Vessup, per the National Park Service. A sugar estate averaged 147 acres; a cotton estate, 85.

Cotton gave way to sugar after 1793, when the cotton gin and American production undercut island cotton, and sugar peaked between 1790 and 1810 with 1,690 acres planted. The work was done by enslaved people. After emancipation the estates lost that labor, and a hurricane in 1867 closed seven of the twelve sugar plantations still working. By 1870 the forest was taking the fields back and many roads had become impassable; the island turned to cattle, bay oil and, by 1935, charcoal.

That is why the ruins in the park sit in second-growth forest: what you walk through at Annaberg or Catherineberg was cane field two centuries ago.

What happened in the 1733 revolt on St. John?

In the early morning of November 23, 1733, a small group of enslaved people entered the Danish West India Company's fort at Coral Bay and killed all the soldiers there but one, the National Park Service records. The year had already brought a drought, a hurricane in July, an insect plague and, in September, harsher punishments for the enslaved.

Many of the people who rose were Akwamu, from a state that had dominated Africa's Guinea Coast until about 1730 and had itself sold captives to European slavers, per the park. The fighting lasted six months. Danish forces, and in the end about 400 French soldiers sent from Martinique, put it down in May 1734, and many Akwamu fighters, facing defeat, took their own lives.

The park counts 44 plantations damaged, about 300 enslaved people killed and three-quarters of the European settlers dead. It calls the rising the Akwamu Insurrection and says it served as a spark for later slave revolts.

How emancipation came on St. Croix in 1848

Slavery in the Danish West Indies ended on July 3, 1848. That day enslaved and formerly enslaved people on St. Croix assembled and took control of Fort Frederik, demanding immediate freedom, and later the same day Governor General Peter von Scholten declared slavery abolished, in the words of the Government of the US Virgin Islands. The park's timeline records the proclamation read on St. Croix that day.

The territory observes July 3 as Emancipation Day. The governor proclaimed it again in 2025. The Danish National Archives' account of the colony marks the same line: until 1848, enslaved people were fundamental to island life.

Freedom did not keep the sugar estates working. On St. Croix, the National Park Service ties the decline of Christiansted to falling cane prices, debt, drought, hurricanes and the loss of slave labor with emancipation in 1848.

How Denmark sold the islands to the United States

The treaty of sale was signed in August 1916, per the National Archives. The National Archives dates the formal transfer of sovereignty to March 28, 1917; the government gives the ceremony as March 31 at 4 p.m., at the site of what is now the Virgin Islands Legislature.

The Navy governed the islands first; the National Archives dates the move to the Department of the Interior to 1931. March 31 is Transfer Day, a legal holiday in the territory per the government's 2018 holiday notice.

The paper trail stayed in Copenhagen. Between 2013 and 2017 the Danish National Archives digitized 5 million pages from the local and central administration of the colony, from its founding in 1672 to the sale in 1917, which is where a reader tracing a family through the estates starts.

What remains of the Danish colony to visit

On St. John, most of what the Danes built is inside Virgin Islands National Park, and the park names four places for it. Annaberg is "the park's most accessible historic plantation site", and the drive from Cruz Bay to the Annaberg spur road measured about 27 minutes. The ruins of Catherineberg are "a well-preserved Danish colonial period site". At Cinnamon Bay the Danes built a plantation on a site of thousands of years of human habitation, and the park began excavating a Taíno temple there in 1998. The Reef Bay trail passes a plantation that made sugar into the early 1900s, long after slavery ended, and the Taíno rock carvings along the same trail.

On St. Thomas, the place to stand is the Legislature on the Charlotte Amalie waterfront, the site of the 1917 transfer.

The tradeoff: the places of emancipation are on St. Croix, not on St. John or St. Thomas. Fort Frederik is where the 1848 rising gathered, and Christiansted National Historic Site keeps Fort Christiansvaern of 1738, the company warehouse of 1749, the Steeple Building of 1753, the Custom House of 1844 and the Scale House of 1856, per the National Park Service.