Often passed through by travellers on the southern highway, Lacovia reveals itself as a quietly charming and picturesque town for those who take time to look. With its broad roadway, spacious sidewalks, historic church, and traces of an early Jewish presence, the St Elizabeth community offers a rich blend of history, architecture, and natural beauty. Once the parish capital, Lacovia today stands as a reminder that some of Jamaica’s most intriguing stories are found in its smaller, slower-growing towns.

Published Thursday, January 2, 1975

Lacovia a Picturesque Town

By Alex D. Hawkes

Most people travelling along the southern highway from Black River onwards to Kingston rush through the town of Lacovia. The road is broad and its surface is infinitely better maintained than most thoroughfares in either Montego Bay or the Corporate Area, and few travellers tend to dawdle in this unusually interesting and slowly growing community in the parish of St Elizabeth.
This is one of the Jamaican towns which stretches out, by and large, along the main roadway to a considerable extent. Except for a recently built development of rather 'boxy' small houses, most of the structures which comprise Lacovia are spread out along the highway, often behind fences across the surprisingly broad sidewalks which grace much of the place.
My accompanying illustration shows the large and attractive church at Lacovia, with its neighbouring, handsomely buttressed tall cotton tree, a species which seems to attain more impressive dimensions in this part of Jamaica than anywhere else. Across the highway from the imposing church is a shop, behind which the interested traveller can locate, with diligent search, five or six tombstones — relics from the largely Jewish populace during the early part of the 18th century.
Lacovia was, in 1723, made the capital of St Elizabeth, and for some 50 years subsequently, courts and vestry meetings were held alternately here and in Black River, the people of the latter seaside community earnestly disputing the right of Lacovia’s title. Today, of course, Black River is the capital of the parish, and Lacovia is far less important.
The name Lacovia is an interesting one, and its precise origins seem rather confused. The original Spanish name for the Black River, which flows not far distant from the present town, was Rio La Caobana, meaning “the river where mahogany trees grow”. The word caoba, or la caoba, even today is applied in this western hemisphere to members of the genus Swietenia, the neotropical mahoganies. Frank Cundall notes that though this word, caoba, may originally be Arawak, “this does not prove that the Arawaks named Lacovia”.
Cundall also suggests that it could be a corruption of lago via, or “way by the lake”, but though parts of the morass or swamp surrounding the Black River system are very marshy, I am unaware that any lake, or large, at least semi-permanent pond, ever existed in the environs. This author further notes that “Long suggests that it may be a corruption of la agua via, ‘the waterway’, and this, of course, could well be the case”.
In any event, present-day Lacovia is an interesting, picturesque town, and the possibilities of its name are intriguing.

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