History
Flint tools found around the area suggest that the site might have been inhabited since prehistoric times. Remnants of buildings, installations and burial caves dating from the first century BCE have been found. The village site contained the Lombard Castle of Roger, built by the Crusaders. The building was mentioned in 1135, mostly destroyed c. 1948, and partly excavated in 1985/86. It appears to have been continuously in use from the Crusader period until 1948. Archaeological findings around the village included the remains of towers, fortresses, wells, reservoirs, cisterns, and pottery.
The village was razed by the troops of Napoleon during their return to Egypt after their failed siege of Acre in 1799, and the British traveller James Silk Buckingham, who passed through the village ("El Mukalid") in 1816, described it as still "rather poor", while noting that the village resembled an Egyptian one in form and constructions of its huts.
In the nineteenth century, Umm Khalid was a rest area between al-Tantura and Ras al-Ayn, where Ottoman officials stopped and received dignitaries. When Mary Rogers, the sister of the British vice-consul in Haifa, visited the Umm Khalid in 1856 she described it as a flourishing village, and noted the extensive melon gardens to the west of the village.
In 1873, the village was described as "A small mud village, with ruins, and a sacred place to the south. On the east is a good masonry well, with troughs and a wheel for raising the water. ... There are also cisterns, and a pond with mud banks. There are cornfields to the east, but the soil is very sandy. The place is famous for its water melons, which are shipped at the little harbour called Minet Abu Zabura." Among the ruins were seen a vaulted building with remnants of a second story, a well built well, and six circular rock-cut granaries.
In 1931, Umm Khalid had 131 occupied houses and a population of 580 Muslims and 6 Christians.
At the village center was a mosque, an elementary school for boys, and four shops for groceries and fabrics. In 1944/45 a total of 47 dunums was used for citrus and bananas, while 1,830 dunums were planted with cereals. At the same time, it was registered that 2,894 dunums of land was Arab owned, 882 Jewish owned, while 89 dunam was public property.
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“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
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