Hassel Island, U.S. Virgin Islands

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hassel Island (also sometimes Hassell Island) is a small island of the U.S. Virgin Islands, a United States territory located in the Caribbean Sea. Hassel Island lies in the Charlotte Amalie harbor just south of Saint Thomas and east of Water Island.

The roughly 136 acre (550,000 m²) island was once a peninsula of Saint Thomas. It was separated by the Danish government in 1860. The channel was widened by the United States Army Corps of Engineers in 1919, two years after the United States purchased the Danish West Indies.

[edit] History

The Danish used Hassel Island's strategic location to defend the busy Charlotte Amalie harbor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The British occupied Hassel Island during the Napoleonic Wars. The ruins of Fort Willoughby and Fort Shipley (Shipley's Battery) can still be seen.

Hassel Island is also notable as the site of the Creque Marine Railway. Initially constructed in the 1840s as the St. Thomas Marine Repair Slip, it is one of the earliest steam-powered marine railways in the western hemisphere and perhaps the oldest surviving example of such a railway.

[edit] Today

In the middle of the 20th century, most of Hassel Island was owned by the prominent local Paiewonsky family. A small hotel located on Hassel Island was immortalized in Herman Wouk's novel Don't Stop the Carnival.

Most of the island is now part of the Virgin Islands National Park. The rest of the island is divided between the territorial government and a few private residences.