Plantations

Plantations in Suriname, by name

Suriname was a plantation colony. Around 1770 roughly 450 estates were working along the Suriname, Commewijne and Cottica rivers, holding an average of about 126 enslaved people each. They ran on forced labour: on people shipped from West Africa and on their children. After slavery was abolished on 1 July 1863 the same fields were worked by indentured labourers from British India, from 1873, and from Java, from 1890.

That is not background colour. It is the direct family history of a large part of the Netherlands. So every plantation below gets its own page: what grew there, who owned it, how many people were held there unfree, what happened after 1863, what stands today and whether you can get to it.

We write what we can source and leave out what we cannot check. Where an estate appears in the 1863 emancipation registers or in the immigration registers we say so, because that is exactly the thread you follow next.

• Mariënburg plantation

  Mariënburg in Commewijne was laid out in 1745 by Maria de la Jaille, bought by the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij in 1882 and turned into the largest sugar enterprise in Suriname. The first 94 Javanese indentured labourers, who landed on 9 August 1890, were sent straight here.

  Commewijne · sugar, coffee · 1745

• Frederiksdorp plantation

  Frederiksdorp on the Commewijne River was laid out in 1747 by the Prussian Johan Friederich Knöffel, produced coffee until 1873 and cacao after that, and is one of the few Surinamese plantations where the police post and the prison cells survive.

  Commewijne · coffee, cotton, cacao · 1747

• Peperpot plantation

  Peperpot, on the right bank of the Suriname River, is one of the oldest plantations in the country, laid out between about 1651 and 1660, and produced sugar, cacao, coffee, cotton and finally citrus until the business stopped in the 1990s. Fifty-one people were freed here at the emancipation of 1863.

  Commewijne · sugar, cacao, coffee, cotton, citrus · ca. 1651 tot 1660

• Alliance plantation

  Alliance in Commewijne was formed in 1829 when the Scot Adam Cameron merged two worn-out coffee estates and turned to sugar; 502 people were freed here in 1863, and between 1873 and 1929 it employed 2,016 Hindustani and 2,136 Javanese indentured labourers.

  Commewijne · coffee, sugar, citrus, bananas · 1829

• Rust en Werk plantation

  Rust en Werk on the Commewijne River was laid out in 1750 by the later governor Wigbold Crommelin, and for genealogy it is one of the richest estates in the country: 430 people were freed here in 1863, under 166 family names.

  Commewijne · coffee, cotton, cacao, sugar · 1750

• Katwijk plantation

  Katwijk on the Commewijne River was granted in 1746 to Alida Maria Wossink, then thirteen years old, and is today the only working coffee plantation left in Suriname; 159 enslaved people were held there in 1759 and 127 were freed in 1863.

  Commewijne · coffee, cacao, citrus · 1746

• Johan en Margaretha plantation

  Johan en Margaretha on the Commewijne River, called Kerkigron in Sranan, belonged from 1757 to 1779 to the Evangelical Lutheran congregation of Paramaribo, which bought the estate together with the people enslaved on it as a source of income. In 1863, 255 people were freed here.

  Commewijne · coffee, cotton, sugar, cacao · 1745

• Zorg en Hoop plantation

  Zorg en Hoop on the lower Commewijne, laid out in 1747, is the plantation where Hindustani indentured labourers rose on 24 September 1884 and where the twenty-four-year-old Janey Tetary was shot in the back of the head at close range on 26 September.

  Commewijne · sugar, cacao · 1747

• Zoelen plantation

  Zoelen on the Commewijne River was founded in 1749 by Constantinus Gerardus Nobel and baron Willem Hendrik Pieck of Zoelen; 115 people were registered as freed here in 1863, and in September 1884 a revolt of indentured labourers was put down by the army.

  Commewijne · coffee, sugar · 1749

• Reynsdorp plantation (Bakkie)

  Reynsdorp on the Warappa creek, better known since the early twentieth century as the village of Bakkie, was a coffee estate holding around a hundred enslaved people; by the emancipation of 1863 production had stopped and only five people were declared free there.

  Commewijne · coffee, cotton, cacao, bananas · 1744

• Voorburg plantation

  Voorburg on the Suriname River, directly beside Fort Nieuw Amsterdam, was laid out around 1750 as garden ground for the fort and then became a sugar estate; at the emancipation of 1863, 195 people were registered there, filed under borderel PL213.

  Commewijne · sugar, cacao, coffee, citrus · ca. 1750

• Dordrecht plantation

  At the Dordrecht estate on the Suriname River, 152 people were declared free on 1 July 1863, and their new surnames almost all begin with a B, an E or an S: the initials of the three owners Brakke, Evertsz and Van Sypesteyn.

  Commewijne · coffee, sugar, cacao, citrus · 1745

• Visserszorg plantation

  Visserszorg on the Commewijne River was first granted land in 1743, switched from coffee to sugar in 1792, and in 1863 ranked among the largest estates in the country with 286 people freed under 77 family names.

  Commewijne · coffee, sugar, cacao, citrus · 1743

• Accaribo plantation

  Accaribo, on the left bank of the Suriname River in Para district, was founded in 1671 by the second governor of Suriname, Philip Julius Lichtenbergh; 139 people were freed here in 1863 under 35 family names, and 268 Hindustani and 162 Javanese indentured labourers worked there afterwards.

  Para · sugar, bananas, coffee · 1671

• Berg en Dal plantation

  Berg en Dal, on the left bank of the Suriname River in Brokopondo, began in 1713 as a military post against Maroon attacks, became a sugar plantation in 1722 and later a timber estate, and held 315 enslaved people at the emancipation of 1863.

  Brokopondo · sugar, cacao, timber · 1722

• Jodensavanne and its plantations

  Jodensavanne on the Suriname River in Para district was the centre of a Portuguese Jewish planter community that by about 1700 held some 9,000 enslaved people across its estates; the Beracha Ve Shalom synagogue was inaugurated in 1685 and the site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2023.

  Para · sugar, coffee, cacao, cotton, timber · 1684

These pages are compiled from published sources, last checked in August 2026, and have not yet been verified on the ground. Spot an error, or know a family name that belongs here? Email us and we will correct it with the source named.