Falmouth

H G deLisser writing in 1912 of the Falmouth of his childhood, in the 1880s:

Twenty-five or thirty years ago the town of Falmouth was falling to ruin, but had not yet reached its present position of desertion, desolation and distress. Its people were leaving it even then; one by one its houses were being shut up, never again to be opened; its trade had dwindled, the planters who rode into town grew fewer steadily, as estate after estate closed down. Yet Falmouth was a town that was proud of itself and thought little of Kingston; Trelawny held itself to be the first parish of the Island. It was very contemptuous of the city. We had heard that in Kingston the people [ate?] cucumbers, the little green vegetable which grew wild in our parish and which the boys used to pelt one another with. We had heard that they lived mainly upon rice cooked with pease, and that was enough for us to refuse to eat that article of food. We were quite convinced that our Court House was the finest building in the island: we knew that once we had threatened to rival the city as a shipping port. We lived on

memories of that former greatness, and the assurance that we represented the old aristocracy and the old way of aristocratic living, on the belief Kingston was a place of parvenus, and that Trelawny and its chief town must some day come into their own again.