Cinnamon Hill

Johnny Cash owned it from the early 1970s and in his 1997 autobiography described a woman in a white dress crossing the dining room, while explaining other noises by physical causes. It is shown on weekday tours run from Rose Hall.

Cinnamon Hill is a great house in the hills above Rose Hall, east of Montego Bay in the parish of St James, Jamaica, on land that was a Barrett sugar estate for more than a century. According to the history published by Jamaica Great Houses, Samuel Barrett junior, owner of the Cornwall and Cinnamon Hill estates, began building the house in 1734 and died in 1760 before it was finished; he is buried on the property. His fourth son of fifteen children, Edward Barrett, completed it in 1784, extended the family holdings to 10,000 acres with the Cinnamon Hill, Oxford and Cambridge estates, and gave the land on which the port of Falmouth was laid out. The historian Frederick DuQuesnay, writing in the 1960s, adds that he was told of a tablet near the road by the ruined sugar works, below the house, bearing Edward's initials and the date 1784. The original house is a single-storey block of cut stone holding the dining and living rooms; a two-storey wing to the east was added between 1780 and 1785. Jamaica Great Houses counts it among the few great houses that survived the slave revolt of 1831. The house is also a family archive of the Barretts of Wimpole Street. DuQuesnay records that Sarah Goodin Moulton, the child of Sir Thomas Lawrence's portrait "Pinkie", was born there in 1783 and died in 1795, and that her brother Edward, born there in 1785, became the father of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Several Barretts lie in the small walled cemetery below the house. One of them is the Hon. Richard Barrett, three times Speaker of the House of Assembly, who fell violently ill at a store in Montego Bay one morning in May 1839 and died shortly afterwards. DuQuesnay quotes the Falmouth Post of 12 May 1839: the jurors summoned by the coroner were not sworn, and by the time a magistrate forced an inquest the body had been removed at midnight and taken to Cinnamon Hill for burial, so the jury could not say how he had died. Septimus Moulton-Barrett, the last of the family to live in the house, died in 1870 and is buried in the same graveyard. Later owners included George Robertson, Joseph Shore and the Henderson family. John Rollins bought the property in the 1960s and sold the house to Johnny Cash in the early 1970s; Wikipedia gives 1972. In his 1997 autobiography Cash recalled finding it "in disrepair but basically sound", with "a playboy" living in a single room, and wrote of the enslaved people who had worked the estate that all that remained of them were "the metal hinges from their doors and nails from their walls". The Cashes kept the house for some thirty years. After their deaths it stayed with the Cash estate until Michele Rollins bought it back in 2012, according to Rose Hall, which now runs tours of it.

Cinnamon Hill is reached through the main gate of the Rose Hall Great House on the north coast east of Montego Bay. Let's Travel Caribbean described in 2021 a right turn before the Rose Hall mansion and a long unpaved road up the hill, and Jamaica Great Houses places the house on the back nine of the Cinnamon Hill golf course. The house belongs to the Rollins family and the tours are run from Rose Hall, whose website is published by Rose Hall Developments Limited. Its tour page, read on 4 October 2026, sets these conditions: Monday to Friday from 10:00 to 15:00, closed at weekends and on public holidays; US$25 for adults and US$10 for children aged 4 to 11, with the online booking form showing US$23 per person beside the US$25 rate; a tour of 45 minutes, subject to the weather; no photographs or video inside the house; reservations required for groups of more than 15; transport to the house not included. The same page states that the tour is "Not handicapped accessible" and that it is not recommended for people with back problems. The telephone number it gives is (876) 953-2341. Jamaica Great Houses describes the rooms kept as the Cashes left them, with a pair of Johnny Cash's shoes in a corner, family portraits on the walls, the triangular hurricane shelter at the north-west corner whose inner room Cash turned into a bathroom, and a detached sewing room used by June Carter Cash. When DuQuesnay drove up in the 1960s, visitors were not allowed and the house could be seen only through its gates.