History Remembers Sacrifice

By Neil Earle
The Compass News, Aug. 11, 2009

Things 'ave 'appened here," E. Annie Proulx has a character say in her 1993 Newfoundland based novel, The Shipping News.

Thanks to a series of three walking tours organized by the Carbonear Island Development Sub-Committee, tourists and visitors this summer were able to apply this observation to the Hub of the Bay.

The tours, which span July 13 to Aug. 21, offered samplings of Carbonear's centuries-long interface with history.

"For years people would say there's nothing for tourists to do in Carbonear," said organizer and coordinator Bert Parsons of the Carbonear Heritage Society. "The walking tours – along with the Friday night events at the Railway Station Museum – should help fix that."

Three pronged strategy

Staffed by students from Carbonear Collegiate, the three walking tours leave from the Railway Museum at selected times spanning out towards the inevitable Princess Sheila's grave (the Willoughby Walk), Harbour Rock Hill (the Planter's Walk) and the Stephen King-like United Church/Anglican Cemetery tour at 7 p.m. on Friday nights (the Moxley Walk).

TOUR GUIDES - Julia Peddle as Mrs. Nicholas Guy and Megan Peddle (Princess Sheila NaGeira) commiserate over their missing husbands. The high school students have been busy this summer taking visitors on walking tours of historic Carbonear.

Students Joshua Chubbs, Megan Peddle, Julia Peddle and Verdon Merrigan acted as guides and narrators along the walk. They also doubled as actors dramatizing some of the more noteworthy characters in Carbonear's story.

The Willoughby Walk (leaving Wednesday's and Thursday's at 3 p.m.) took its name from Percival Willoughby, a West Country English planter who may justly lay claim to being Carbonear's formal founder. His agent Nicholas Guy built a homestead just east of Rossiter's Pond, now alive with lush vegetation since the not-so-far-away days when Saunders Howell had their headquarters there.

Verdon and Megan pointed out the original Gut Bridge, built in 1836, effectively linked Carbonear's North and South Sides. Brooks, streams and ponds were integral to securing settlement in colonial times. Carbonear was no exception.

Ironically the 1968 version of the Gut was under repair as Verdon related some of the Saddle Hill stories of union struggles and atrocities that marked Newfoundland and Labrador's slow movement towards social justice.

Another little known fact is the whale factory that once lay at the foot of Harbour Rock Hill, 80 feet down and apparently lashed by 20-foot tides in the Great Storm of 1775. The waves were so severe, some 200 ships were driven aground as far down the shore as Northern Bay.

Imagine that!

Did you know that the boards covering the Bond Theatre – built in 1948 – were taken from a former German POW camp in Victoria?

Or that the first movie screened there was Razor's Edge? – the last being the second film in the Star Wars saga?

To us movie addicts of the 1950s Joshua, Julia, Verdon and Megan can tell you all that and more.

Heroism and struggle

The Planter's Walk retells the story of the truly heroic Tryphoena Nicholl who died at the old Post Office while alerting two other occupants to safely flee a fire.

This was 1904 and Tryphoena's story is curiously reminiscent of the more famous Triangle Shirt Fire in New York in 1912. There over 100 seamstresses jumped to their death as a fire broke out in the multi-story building where they worked, a rat-trap with no fire extinguishers, no fire escapes and locked doors to keep the girls at their drudgery. The only bright spot in this tragedy was the appearance on the scene of a young social worker named Frances Perkins who became President Roosevelt's erstwhile Secretary of Labour in the 1933 New Deal cabinet.

Different times. Different expectations. It took pain and struggle to benefit from some of the things we see as standard today – one of the uses of history, of setting the micro against the macro. The brave Miss Nicholl is buried at the U.C. Cemetery (her first name is from Romans 16:12).

She deserved her impressive granite monument now in the Memorial Park and which we passed every day on the way to school, when the monument stood near the Old Post Office at the foot of Musgrave Street. The engraved scripture sticks in the mind:

"Greater love hath no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends" (John 15:13).