Sometime between 1632 and 1650, Captain William Carr (the man for whom Carr’s Bay is named) founded a sugar plantation at Little Bay Estate. The core of the plantation consisted of the sugar works: a cattlemill, boilinghouse, and curinghouse, as well as a greathouse and the worker’s village. Sugar fields occupied the surrounding gently sloping land and a large stone well sat in the lowland between the estate buildings and the sea (just east of the current Little Bay port road).

Captain Carr may have started Little Bay Estate as early as 1639; since Montserrat was settled by Europeans in 1632, this would make Carr’s plantation one of the very first on the island. The estate apparently produced sugar into the 19^th century, but by the 20^th century, the land was planted in cotton and the sugar works were abandoned. Some plantation buildings may have then been used for cotton storage or for other purposes not yet known.

Carr probably employed a crew of Irish indentured servants and after 1650 some African slaves to work the land and make sugar. A census of 1678 lists many Irish servants by name and groups of slaves, as being in St. Peters parish, but none are specifically attributed to Little Bay. These Irish and African workers probably lived and raised their families in the Little Bay worker’s village the remains of which are on the adjacent hillside to the east, outside the presently fenced part of the site.

Carr’s Greathouse sat on a high knoll overlooking the working yard of the plantation and the sugar cane fields that stretched across the valley to Little Bay beach. Test excavations at the house site in 1983 and 2006 revealed the foundation walls and the basic dimensions of the house. Excavations have barely begun, but some early artifacts are associated with the greathouse structure. They indicate that the house was burned, probably in 1665, when the French attacked Montserrat and burned many, if not all, of the plantations on the island. Obviously, it was soon rebuilt, because it is shown on the 1673 unique coastal profile map of Montserrat drawn by Wm. Stapleton (Pulsipher, 1987). Eighteenth century artifacts from the house site seem to indicate that it was burned again after 1700.