How Prince’s Town got it’s name.

143 years ago, on January 21, 1880, Princes Town got its name.
Previously called Mission de Savannah Grande by the Spanish colonisers, it was renamed to mark a visit by two British princes, one of whom would become King some 40 years later.
The area, first inhabited by the First Peoples before the arrival of the Spanish missionaries in 1687 and Canadian Missionaries in 1868, came to be referred to locally as “nissan,” a version of the name, Mission.
In 1880, Princes Albert, 15, and George, 14, came to Trinidad as part of a world tour of The Mediterranean, Australia, Fiji, Tenerife, Africa, and the West Indies.
They’d known about Mission —then two broad  streets of stores and cottages— by way of Charles Kingsley’s book “At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies” which records his 1869 visit to the area which he called “paradise”.
At the request of the rector of the town’s St. Stephen’s Anglican Church, Reverend J.G Knight, the princes planted two poui trees in the churchyard. Thereafter, Mission was called Princes Town. Prince Albert died from pneumonia in 1892, at age 24. George became King George V of The United Kingdom in 1920, and reigned until his death in 1936.

​Video extract from The Story of Princes Town by the National Trust of Trinidad and Tobago: https://youtu.be/mAZZbTJ_jqI