The forgotten Virgin, St. Croix—ogled by Columbus, boyhood home of Alexander Hamilton, getaway to Richard Nixon—is making a spectacular comeback. AMY ENGELER finds the once-scruffy island is a great escape

The directions seemed typical for the island. Turn left at the big aloe plants and again onto Miss Bea Road. Look for a pull-over in the tall grass—beyond is the beach. Since St. Croix doesn't have many long strips of sand but dozens of little inlets—hidden behind mangroves, houses, and even a fairway bluff—everyone has his own favorites. I was almost sure I'd been given a misleading tip from the organ restorer at St. John's, the old Anglican church on the outskirts of the island's capital, Christiansted, until I saw the sea grape tree I'd been told to look for, hung with towels.

A family with yellow swim caps bobbed in the gentle waves. My twelve-year-old son, James, took one look at the curving, already occupied beach, the deep-blue water, indicating a steep drop-off, and shrugged. Not his favorite. With so many beaches to choose from, it's easy to be picky about a swim. On an island the size of Martha's Vineyard, underdeveloped by Caribbean standards and traversed in half an hour, why not? We finished our sandwiches, brushed off the sand, and moved on.

For years, St. Croix residents have bemoaned their position as the overlooked U.S. Virgin Island. Forty miles north, with a third of St. Croix's landmass and three times as many hotels, plus noise and exhaust, St. Thomas welcomes a glitzier crowd, along with a continuous stream of cruise ships that dock bow to stern in Charlotte Amalie's busy harbor. Just east of St. Thomas lies St. John, the Virgin most fawned over for its stunning parklands. In contrast, like a forgotten stepsister, sitting alone in the sea, south of all the other Virgins, St. Croix has seen just one new resort open during the past two decades. Downtown Christiansted, with stately neoclassical buildings left over from its time under the Danish crown, retains the same scruffy elegance it had fifty years ago, before the tourist boom swept east from Cuba but pretty much missed St. Croix.

Some bum luck comes from brushes with nefarious characters—most recently international financier Allen Stanford, charged with bank fraud and now jailed in Texas, who leaves a multimillion-dollar trail of debt and unfinished projects on the island—and some from the weather. William F. Cissel, in his solid old plantation house on Estate La Reine, held in his family for six generations, remembered the day in 1989 when he called the hurricane center in Miami for news of an impending storm. "This man says, 'Tell me, is St. Croix part of the Virgin Islands?' Remember, this is someone who watches the Caribbean as his job," Cissel said. "I said, 'Yes.' He says, 'Oh, my, you may have a problem!' "

Cissel can laugh about that story now. At the time it felt like a double blow, to be almost invisible to the world and facing the worst storm in a century, Hurricane Hugo, which, hours after that phone call, tore the leaves off nearly every tree on the island and severely damaged nine out of ten buildings. Cissel hunkered down behind thick wood shutters, listening to the horrifying racket, and afterward took in several friends who had cowered in a bathtub and a cistern as their houses blew apart around them.