Cat Island was once home to one of the more prosperous Loyalist colonies of the Out Islands. The island gained its wealth from the numerous cotton plantations established during the 1700s. Now, vine-covered, semi-ruined mansions and stone walls from farms where cattle were penned and pineapples grown, play hide and seek within the tropical flowers, grass and sand. Crumbling remnants of slave villages and artifacts in Arawak caves whisper of a life long past. Descendants of those early settlers remain in the same towns of their ancestors.