Captain Samuel Hemmings Seville Greate House: The First Proprietor (c. 1670s)
Captain Samuel Hemmings was the founding father of the English estate at Seville. An officer in the conquering army of 1655, he was the first Englishman to hold title to the land that had previously served as the Spanish capital of Jamaica. His tenure marks the pivotal transition from the Spanish Sevilla la Nueva to the British Seville Plantation.
The Conquest (1655)
Samuel Hemmings arrived in Jamaica as part of the famous "Western Design" expedition led by Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables. While the expedition failed to take Hispaniola, it successfully captured Jamaica from the Spanish.
Following the conquest, the English Crown distributed land to the officers to encourage settlement. Hemmings received one of the most prestigious—and eerie—grants on the island: a massive 2,500-acre tract on the north coast that encompassed the ruins of Sevilla la Nueva, the abandoned Spanish city and first capital of the island.
Living Among Ruins
When Hemmings took possession of the land, he did not find a virgin forest. He found a ghost city. The grant included the crumbling remains of the Governor's Castle, the fortified tower, and the unfinished Peter Martyr Church, which the Spanish had abandoned nearly a century earlier.
The First Great House
Hemmings constructed the first English residence on the site in the late 17th century (circa 1670s). Unlike the current house, which sits further up the hill, Hemmings' original home was located closer to the sea and the industrial works.
It was a fortified structure, built in an era when the English were constantly terrified of Spanish counter-attacks. Under his direction, the estate was reorganized into a massive sugar plantation. He leveraged the fertile coastal plains, reviving the sugar industry on the very site where the Spanish had established one of the earliest mills in the hemisphere a century prior.
Samuel Hemmings established a dynasty that would hold the Seville estate for over two centuries. The property passed from Samuel to his descendants, eventually reaching his grandson, Richard Hemming [see Timeline].
It was Richard who, in 1745, decided that his grandfather's 17th-century fortified house was too old-fashioned. He demolished parts of the original settlement to build the airy, two-story Georgian Great House that stands (in modified form) today.