Museums on Marie Galante : Art and Culture

Art & Culture on Marie Galante : Museums

An 18th-19th century sugarcane plantation and habitation, situated a few kilometres from Grand Bourg. A certain Dominique Murat, originally from the southwest of France (near Bordeaux, a great slave port at the time) moved to Capesterre with his 34 slaves and took the function of notary, negotiator and coffee planter in 1770.
Though they lived in the same age, he and Marshall Joachim Murat, king of Naples under the reign of Napoleon appear to have no common parantage. In April 1807, under the island’s last English occupation (1805-1815), Dominique Murat and his 24-year-old son, Emmanuel purchased a modest sugracane plantation, formerly property of the widow of Dumoulier of Grand Bourg (relative of the Poisson family, one of the oldest planter dynasties of the island).
The plantation gave work to 118 slaves, and was named Bellevue-Laplaine due to its topographic characteristics on the small coastal plain overlooking the Caribbean Sea, the island of Dominica and surrounding sugarcane fields. Legend has it that one of Murat’s daughters is responsible for the plans of this marvelous estate built from white calcareous stone, ressembling a chateau in the region of Bordeaux. The habitation was abandoned in the last years of the 19th century, after its last owner, Mr. Reponty furnished it with a steam engine in 1872, insalling the machine in the sugar factory situated below the two mills: the 18th-century one operated by oxen and the wind-powered one, constructed in 1814 by the Murat family.
A ravaging earthquake occurred in 1843 and caused great damage to the island’s habitations, from which most of them would never be reconstructed. The ruins of some of these imposing industrial buildings can still be found in certain regions of the island, paying hommage to three centuries of industrial history on Guadeloupe and its surroundings: a rare sight to see in the region. The Marat factory used three different technologies: animal power with the oxen mill, the energy of the wind with its windmills and that of heat with the instalment of the steam engine on the factory’s ground floor. The latter replaced the old 18th-century technology invented by Pere Labat, comprising of a system of nine heaters aligned on the ground floor ensuring the cooking and fabrication of sugar. Maitre Murat’s mansion, one of the island’s rare stone houses was restored in 1970 by the SODEG, which had originally planned to develop the estate and exploitation into a luxury hotel. The project failed, and the domaine came under ownership of the municipality in 1983, which created Marie Galante’s Ecomuseum on its 7 hectares of preserved land. Initiative of Guadeloupe’s natural park and history society, the creation of this ecological reserve was a response to a large ethnological survey referred to as “Inventory of Traditions and Popular Art on Marie Galante”, conducted between 1976 and 1980 with the participation of the island’s population. The operation permits the preservation if the island’s disappearing patrimony and the realisation of a great number of exhibitions on the region’s history and culture based on objects and documents collected on site. Marie Galante’s Ecomuseum is currently in the project of renovating and rehabilitating its most important buildings and edifices.