Charles Spearman Armstrong

Charles Spearman Armstrong (1847–1924) was an Irish-born pioneer of tea and cinchona in British Ceylon, where he arrived in 1863.

[1] In 1863, at the age of sixteen, Armstrong sailed to Ceylon, at a time when planters there were abandoning their plantations, due to a collapse in coffee.

Travelling there by horse, Armstrong found an estate of moribund coffee trees and a log cabin.

[2] James Taylor is widely considered to be the first man to plant tea in British Ceylon as an agricultural enterprise, and this was in 1867 at the Loolecondera estate near Deltota.

However, a granite monument at Rookwood erected by his children claims that Armstrong grew cinchona and tea there from 1864 to 1908.