Hamilton Green’s letter Image is Important

Nov 02, 2019 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,

One of the matters, which Mr. Hamilton Green wrote about in his letter published on October 31 was the filling in of trenches and canals. Contrary to what Hammie Green suggests in that letter, not all trenches dug in Guyana were drainage canals. For example, the former north-south canals in Cummingsburg, which are now avenues in East St, Thomas St, Camp St, Waterloo St, Carmichael St and Main St, were not drainage canals. They were water reservoirs to be used in the event of fires.
There was another letter, from one of the owners of the former plantation where the filled in punt trench is located, which claimed that the punt trench was just that – a trench used to take cut canes from the fields to the factory, by means of punts. I cannot say how true that is, since I have never seen a survey map of the area. But it is true that a trench is not necessarily a drainage canal. Cummingsburg drains into the canal on the northern side of Lamaha St. and to the canal on the southern side of Church St. (not the central canal which is now Merriman’s Mall – that was a canal that carried water from the Lamaha canal to the old water works that was located in the area between Church St. and North Road, east of Camp St. – now a garden). The Church St. canal flows to a koker located north of the old Sanbach Parker building, now Muneshwar’s. The outflow to that koker was once blocked- resulting in floods in Cummingsburg.
And, by the way, all the Cummings place names were originally “Cuming’s” – one “m”, the name of the owner of a plantation that was formerly La Bourgade, Thomas Cuming. His wife was Kitty. Hence, the wards of Georgetown Cuming’s Burg (the original name) and Kitty, as well as Thomas Lands (given in his will to Georgetown for recreational and educational usage), Thomas St., and Cummings St. – I have never been able to find out when we started using the double “m”.
Thomas Cuming made his fortune in Demerara as did many Scots, and was a member of the old Dutch legislative body, the Court of Policy. His nephew Lachlan Cuming owned plantation Chateau Margot where the 1823 Demerara slave rebellion began.

Pat Robinson Commissiong
(Mrs. – for the benefit of the letter
writer who responded to my last
letter to Kaieteur News, referring
to me as “he”. That I ain’t and never was.)

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