Nelliampathy

The whole Nelliyampathy hills is known to have belonged to Vengunad Kovilakam of Kollengode (a small principality of Malabar), who then leased out vast tracts of this virgin forest area to the British Government of Madras Presidency. The Halls, perhaps the best known of the early planters in the Nellies, always held that there were others before them in these hills where only tribals roamed before the land was opened up by the planters. By the time Arthur Hall arrived in the Nellies in 1877, there appeared to have been coffee planted without shade in what were later known as Shernelly, halfway up the ghat, and Nelikolam Estates, the latter on the plateau. Arthur Hall started planting at Cotengady, near Padagiri, and was the father of planting in the Nellie. Similarly vast tracts of virgin forest in the Nelliyampathy hills were leased out in the year 1889 to two Britishers by name Mr. Holmes and Mr. Macanzey. By the 1890s, there were over a hundred European planters in the district, mostly from the coffee districts of Mysore, but by the 1930s there were no more than half a dozen and most of the coffee they had planted lay abandoned· The Halls’ property and James Finlay’s at Sethangandy (Seethargundu) were two that were still flourishing at the time· Both older estates also planted cardamom and a visitor to Sethangandy said its cardamom were "the biggest and best he’d ever seen....