The French settlers cultivated coffee, tobacco, indigo, corn, and sugar on plantations worked by African slaves.

In the time of slavery, Barrouallie was the center of a sugar cane-growing area on the leeward coast of Saint Vincent, with a number of flourishing estates on the nearby volcanic slopes.

It was renowned for its beautiful little Anglican Church with a distinguished bell tower and black and white marble tiles (brought as ballast on the sugar ships) on the floor of its interior.

The Emancipation of Slaves in the British Empire, resolved on by the British Parliament in 1833 and actually implemented in St. Vincent and other Caribbean islands by 1838, proved a mixed blessing - releasing people from bondage but also causing an economic crisis in a society hitherto based on slave labor.

Among these were Caroline Arindell, who was born in Barrouallie about 1850, and her husband John McShine - both of whom emigrated in the 1860s to Trinidad, where their descendants were to become well-known.