COMUTO

A tributary of the River Caroni (Rio Comuto) gave rise to the name of the village Comuto which was not a settlement until the turn of the 1900s. This village lay towards the easterly areas of the Caroni basin.

The bid to develop central areas of Trinidad started in 1849, when Lord Harris created the ward of Upper Caroni. It was not until the large-scale cultivation of cocoa in the 1870s – and the 1880s that it was seen as useful to establish new villages in those areas.

In 1881 the Government built the Comuto Road, and formed a junction with it and the roads to Tumpuna and Caratal. This became the central area of the village.

There was an acute problem obtaining clean water because the rivers were polluted. Most of Comuto’s population were the East Indians who had left the sugar estates of Lower Caroni. To cater for the children of this new village, the Canadian missionaries opened the first Presbyterian school in 1930.

The outbreak of the first European war in 1914 met Cumoto green with cocoa and coffee plantations. In the years between 1914 and 1921 Comuto grew significantly, for the population rose from just a few families in 1914 to a population of 388 at the census of 1921. In the following 10 years there was no remarkable increase, for in 1931 it showed only 577. This slowing down was certainly due to the fact that the district’s chief crop, cocoa, had suffered an island wide decline throughout most of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1941 the coming of American soldiers to Trinidad, started the axe men clearing the Comuto-El Mamo forests for the construction of a military base.

The American presence brought a sudden change in tempo as people crowded in from all the surrounding areas to work on what was widely known as “The Comuto bass.” Most of Comuto’s residents were absorbed in work on the base erasing the agricultural district, from the Trinidad map. For who would work with cutlass and hoe and shovel, when there was easy money to be made next door, and a great deal of it. Beyond that, not only the Comuto villagers crowded the Comuto base to work, but also the American soldiers swarmed the village, making it a hive of activity and entertainment, but not always of good character. By 1946, one year after the war, the population of Comuto village was 2,320.

Agriculture never returned to Comuto as it was before the American arrival. Many of the workers sought work in the oilfield rather than returning to the land. The village did not return into obscurity, it emerged as a very important hub of communication with the central areas, in the 1950s through the 1960s been close to the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway it remain a key transit point to remote villages of Guatapajaro, Four Roads, Tamana, Talparo, Coryal and Coryat.

Because of its terrain and its accessibility from the main centres Comuto continued to attract people, and no longer having water problems because it’s next door to the Arena water dam.

Referance Books:
Towns and Villages of Trinidad & Tobago  by Michael Anthony
Atilla's Kaiso: A short history of Trinidad calypso  by Raymond Quevedo
West Indian & their Language  by Peter A Roberts
Calypso & Society in Pre-Independance Trinidad  by Gordon Rohlehr
British Historians and the West Indies  by Eric Williams