Bethlehem Old Work is a settlement on the island of Saint Croix in the United States Virgin Islands. It was set-up as one of the first plantations in the 1730s, and operated as the last sugar plantation on the island until the Bethlehem Central Factory closed in 1966. Location Bethlehem Old Works, also known as Lower Bethlehem, was part of the Estate Bethlehem in the flat center of St. Croix, where now the VIARNG armory is located along the Bethlehem Gut waterway, which had been called South Salt River in the colonial era. Other parts of the Estate were Bayworks (Fairplain) in the south and Middle Works (Upper Bethlehem) in the north. Name The source of the name of Estate Bethlehem is unknown, but it was probably named after Bethlehem, Pennsylvania by the Moravians, who evangelized the Danish Virgin Islands since 1732 at a mission in Friedensfeld near Lower Bethlehem. History The Danish West India Company, which often acted as an agent on behalf of the Danish Crown, purchased St. Croix from France in 1733. Prior to this deal, the settlement was labeled Baron on a French map of 1671. The area that became known as Bethlehem was deeded to King Christian VI and the Queen in 1736, as it was flat and ideally suited for cultivation of sugar or cotton benefiting from the fresh water of the Bethlehem Gut. In 1739, King's Quarter was subdivided: Parts of it were sold to the Dutch governor of St. Eustatius Peter Heyliger and his brother Johannes, while four plots were retained by the King, until they were sold to the Heyligers in 1751. The first windmill was built at Bethlehem in the late 1760s. A map of 1779 by the military surveyorFrederik Christian von Meley shows Lower Bethlehem on the right as an eighteenth century Danish sugar plantation. The Old Works occupied 450 acres, and was divided into 27 variably sized plots. The slave village consisted of four rows of ten structures each, and the provision grounds occupied an acre and a half to the west of the village. Further south were the sugar mill and associated buildings for processing sugar cane. In the 1820s, Estate Bethlehem suffered from a drought, a hurricane and the drop in sugar prices, and were thus sold to Benjamin De Forest at an auction in 1831. In 1882, William H. Carson, a Danish investor, bought the