Hidden behind curtains and hugging the walls of the thrift store located beside the Heritage Kitchen in West Bay is an amazing treasure trove of Cayman’s past.
“I began collecting bits of Cayman history back in the 80s,” explained collector Tony Powell.
“Back then, I was on the West Bay heritage committee for Pirates Week.
“We kept getting second place in the heritage competition and East End would come first. Dalkeith Bothwell and I decided we would go up to [East] End to figure out what was going on. We saw they had plenty of antiques.”
That experience motivated Powell to collect artefacts from the olden times in West Bay.
“We had a meeting with the West Bay heritage committee and Sheridan Smith had an old gas iron. Floyd Bush brought some shipbuilding tools from his grandfather, including a wood plane and a clamp, and Edmund Powery took me up to what we call ‘the hill’ by Mount Pleasant and we got some odds and ends from up there, and a few other people brought me some things and donated them and I bought a few artefacts from people as well,” Powell said.
The collecting paid off. That year, West Bay won top prize for heritage in the Pirates Week festival.
“I kept collecting and ended up creating a heritage museum in the early ’90s and kept it open until 2021, but it really didn’t make any money,” he said.
The Cayman Compass visited Powell at the old museum and walked around as he explained the story behind some of the artefacts.
There were old clay pots used by Caymanians to carry water and a pitcher he said came from Ethel Barnes. There was a net to catch turtles and an old brass telescope.
He pointed to shark fins dating back to the 1950s when Caymanians would range around the Mosquito Coast, the banks and the cays, hunting sharks in catboats for the leather industry.
“That brass bell came from the vessel the ‘Dreamer’s Dream’,” he said, adding, “It was a ganja boat, a ketch, that wrecked on the reef near Pappagallo.
“Nobody knows what happened to the crew. They disappeared,” he said, as he pointed to a wood picture frame surrounding a photo of his father, James Prentice Powell Sr. and his Aunt Izzy.
“That frame also came from the same shipwreck. It is a piece of teak that went around the base of the mast.”
Hugging the walls of the museum turned thrift store was a ‘Whomper’, an old Cayman shoe made from tyres and thatch, a hand-carved wood float for a fish pot and a photo of the first church in West Bay.
Powell explained that the church got washed away in the hurricane of 1903.
Powell pointed to a number of neatly labelled bits of timber from the forested areas in West Bay, with each label detailing the various types of tree and how Caymanians would use the various woods that grew in their district.
As Powell explained the origins and uses of the artefacts, his descriptions provided insight into the lives of the hardy Caymanians, who back in those days depended mostly on their wits and natural resources to survive.
Regarding the future of the collection, Powell said, “If the museum wanted to buy the pieces I have collected from West Bay and are willing to keep the collection together, I might be open to talking to them.”
Persons interested in seeing the collection can visit the thrift store by the Heritage Kitchen by Boggy Sands Road in West Bay.
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I enjoyed seeing the collection in West Bay at the thrift store.