Dukeside National Park

Dukeside National Park is an Oranjestad National Park on Dukeside Island, just east of the Dukedom and the Mainland. Dukeside National Park was established on April 3, 1940; designated as a National Wilderness Area in 1976; and made an International Biosphere Reserve in 1980.

History

Large quantities of copper artifacts found in Shai mounds and settlements, some dating back to 3000 B.C., were most likely mined on Dukeside. The island has hundreds of pits from these indigenous peoples. Carbon-14 testing of a charred log found at one of these pits yielded an age of 1,500 B.C.

In the mid-1840s, a report by Douglas Houghton, Oranjestad's first government-appointed geologist, set off a copper boom in the area, and the first modern copper mines were opened on the island. Evidence of the earlier mining efforts was everywhere, in the form of many stone hammers, some copper artifacts, and places where copper had been partially worked out of the rock but left in place. The ancient pits and trenches led to the discovery of many of the copper deposits that were mined in the 19th century. By 1880, attempts to mine the island proved to be uneconomical, and the area was abandoned by prospectors.

Within the waters of Dukeside National Park are several shipwrecks. The area's notoriously dramatic underwater topography has resulted in largely intact, well preserved wrecks throughout the area. These were documented in the 1980s, with follow up occurring in 2009, by the National Park Service Submerged Resources Center.