On the road to Humber Valley - we are coming your way in May!

Department of Highways Trucks, 1930s
used during the construction of the highway
between Corner Brook and Deer Lake, courtesy Deb LeDrew

Attention all knitters, crocheters, snowshoe makers, people who know traditional recipes, and anyone who makes, crafts, or creates objects - Heritage NL is looking for you!

The Humber Valley Skills Inventory, part of the Humber Valley Thriving Regions project, will identify existing knowledge holders in the area, including craft producers, bakers, farmers, foragers, brewers, printmakers, fly tyers, beekeepers, cooks, artists, antler carvers, and makers of all kinds.  We are looking for anyone with skills and knowledge about the making of everyday objects, skills, art, and crafts from these communities:

Steady Brook, Little Rapids, Humber Village, Humber Valley Resort, Pasadena, Pynn’s Brook, Little Harbour, St. Judes, Deer Lake, Reidville, Cormack, and Howley

The end product will be a publicly-available listing of local skills holders. For examples see:

• Saving Traditional Skills in the Tri Town Area and Surrounding Communities, Great Northern Peninsula (2022)

• Baccalieu Trail Traditional Knowledge Inventory (2021)

If you wish to be listed in the Inventory, email ich@heritagenl.ca or fill out the survey at https://forms.gle/53EMsrC9mTm9FUku7 

 

Heritage NL will be at three open-to-all meetings where you are encouraged to come and learn about the project.  If you are crafty, bring an object you made to show and share!

 

• Monday, May 8th, 7-9pm - Cormack Skills Show and Share - Cormack Town Hall 
• Tuesday, May 9th, 6:30-8:30pm - Yarns and Yarns with the Knit Wits - Pasadena Place, 19 Tenth Avenue, Pasadena
• Wednesday, May 10th, 1pm -3pm - Yarns and Yarns with Kindred Spirits Knit 'n Yarn - Salvation Army, 20 Church Street (corner of Chapel Hill), Deer Lake
• Thursday, May 11th, 7-9pm - Deer Lake Skills Show and Share  - Humber Lodge, 2 Poplar Road
• Saturday, May 13th, 1pm -3pm - Pasadena Heritage Society AGM - Royal Canadian Legion, 92 Main Street. You can register with Pasadena Heritage at https://forms.gle/fBnzU3TL1jk8zF7F7 to help plan number of attendees. Coffee, tea and treats will be provided!

"I live in Bug Town" - Mapping out the heritage assets of Deer Lake

Before the Covid-19 lockdown, Heritage NL assisted the Town of Deer Lake with one of our People, Places, and Culture workshops, helping identify heritage assets in the community. The workshop involves people writing out recipe cards like the one above, noting things like placenames, historically interesting people, old shops and stores, or places where things used to happen. Then, we put them on a big paper map, and start to figure out clusters of places for future research and planning. I always love finding out some of the local informal neighbourhood names which you would never know if you didn't live there (like Bug Town!).

Since then, I've started to put some of that information on a Google Map, and have been compiling a list of names of people (past and present) who are of cultural or historical interest.  This is a very preliminary list, with a lot of gaps in it. If you have information on any of these people, or have suggestions for other Deer Lake people who should be included, email dale@heritagenl.ca or comment below.

Family Name	First Name	Notes
?	?	War Veteran Farmers
Ball	Ralph	Blacksmith
Barrett	?	Store owner
Basha	Mike
Basha	Frankie
Bearsley	?	Manager of Power House, wife was involved with Girl Guides possibly?
Bolos	Dan	Blacksmith
Brownie	?	farmer
Butt	Joe	Gas station
Chaulk	Bill	Bowater superintendant
Coish	Amos	Harness maker in the 1930s
Critch	?	Store owner
Critch	Becky	Store owner
Critch	Mose	Store owner
Dinney	Elias	worked as a carpenter on penstocks in early 1920s
Eddy	?	Store owner
Feltham	Abraham	original settler at Junction Brook, worked on Main Dam, farmer
Green(e?)	TM	First doctor
Hayden	Victor	had second operation in Deer Lake hospital - appendix
Hinton	?	Mrs.?
Hodder	Phil	Rec Centre named for him
Housell	Mamie	lives on Hancock's Road, housed moved from Junction Brook, daughter of Abe Feltham
Hruse (?)	?	teacher
Lung	Jim	Owner of first Chinese restaurant in Deer Lake, on Main Street
McDonald	?	Doctor, made house calls, after hour visits, no set office hours for patients
Morey	Melva	Grade 4 teacher
Morey	Doug	farmer
Nicols	?	Original settlers, farmers, fishing and hunting guides
Osmond	?	Store owner
Prowse	?	Had farm on Humber River near upper bridge
Reid	Alexander (Sandy)	towed houses from Junction Brook to Newtown in Deer Lake during the 1950s in preparation for the airport
Schwartz	Sam	Shop keeper, businessman. Job interview -you had to break the twine, if you broke it, you were hired
St. George	?	Hotel owner
Stuckless	?	Store owner, 5th Ave
Wight	Harold	Long time employee of Deer Lake Airport
Williams	?	Store owner

#CollectiveMemories Roadtrip to Humber Valley - People, Places and Traditions

Discussing people, places, and traditions.

On Wednesday Dale and I headed back to Reidville, the community where we interviewed Clifford Reid, in order to do a second People, Places, and Traditions workshop. We ended up with a smaller crowd due to the size of the town.  This meant that the sixteen of us were able to sit around one big table and have a discussion about some of the town’s history and stories.

Writing on their index cards.

After discussing the people, places, and traditions in the community we handed out index cards for everyone to fill out. Everyone took a couple of cards and wrote out someone, some place, or some tradition which is important to the community. We then mapped the cards on the large map of the community.

The story of Dead Man's Woods.

What was great about this workshop was that the size of the group and the close-knit community meant it turned into a story telling session with people taking turns telling stories from their childhood. Russ Reid told many stories about Mr. Oxford and himself growing up and the trouble they would get into.  The stories ranged from antagonizing the bull in his pen to sneaking up to the lumber camps, there were stories about a child who fell into a well and survived, a woman who gave birth in a canoe on her way to Deer Lake, and almost everyone had a story about stealing apples or fruit from their neighbours’ yards.

Adding stories and memories to the map.

Impromptu story telling around the Reidville map.

Reidville is located on a river and the islands of the river were named as well as the beaches which served as swimming holes or trouting spots. One of the islands, named Grandmother’s Island, was where Mr. Oxford would collect the long grass which would be used in their psalm Sunday services in the school which doubled as a church.

Discussing the future of heritage in the Humber Valley region.

After the session in Reidville Dale and I headed to Deer Lake where we had quick supper, and a poke around the community and two of the local cemeteries before heading to the Grand Lake Centre of Economic Development for a meeting with the Humber Valley Heritage society. We met with four members of the heritage society to talk about the future of heritage in Humber Valley. These women were the people who invited us out to lead the workshops and do some interviews and they are interested in how they can use the information collected at workshops like these. The heritage society is interested in holding similar events around the Humber Valley region in order to work together to promote the heritage of the region. The first thing they plan to do is take the information located on the physical maps and store it digitally. The committee is very interested in using Google My Maps to make this material accessible to and also editable by community members. They want to create a map of the region in order to showcase the agricultural heritage of the region and increase the tourism to all the communities.

~Terra Barrett

People, Places, and Traditions Tea

Dale and I are out on the West Coast this week doing some interviews, workshops, and meetings in Corner Brook, Pasadena, Reidville, and Deer Lake.  We are hosting a couple of People, Places and Traditions Workshops and invite everyone in the area to come out and talk about your community.

Tonight we will be in Pasadena from 6:30-9:30pm at Pasadena Hall and tomorrow afternoon we will be in Reidville in the Community Hall from 1:30-4:30pm. Drop by, have a cup of tea, and share some memories of your community!

~Terra Barrett

“Not every town has heritage buildings. Every town has heritage.” Notes from the road

I had a very quick trip to Deer Lake and back last Friday and Saturday. I had been invited by Carole Spicer to talk about heritage at the annual general meeting of the Grand Lake Centre of Economic Development. I was treated to their roast beef dinner and then talked about what heritage means to communities, demonstrating the links between our architectural heritage and our intangible cultural heritage, oral history, and folklore.

The audience was mostly made up of local volunteers, community workers, and councillors from the surrounding communities. One of the points I made was that while not every town has heritage buildings, every town has heritage of some kind that is worth safeguarding. Sometimes communities get focussed on heritage places or running a community museum to preserve artefacts that they forgot that local stories, skills, and knowledge are just as important.

They put me up at a local AirBNB, and then on Saturday morning we met back the Grand Lake Centre of Economic Development (a great spot to rent if you are looking for meeting space in the area) for a heritage workshop, with representation from Cormack, Reidville, Deer Lake and Pasadena. We talked about oral history, digitizing collections, and community mapping. I gave examples of what is happening with other communities across Newfoundland and Labrador, and talked about how communities can better engage local people and turn collected stories and oral histories into more participatory community events.

We had a great chat about identifying local heritage assets, war brides, cultural diversity, agricultural history, and jam making! Several topics seemed to generate the most discussion, including the need to work more on a regional heritage cluster or region, and the need for some community mapping to identify local heritage places and traditions.

So, I expect you will hear more about work in the Humber Valley area! I’m planning on heading back later this summer to run a train-the-trainer session on our “People, Places, and Traditions” workshop, so that a series of community mapping sessions can be carried out in communities in the valley. Stay tuned!

Want a heritage workshop for your community? Email me at ich@heritagefoundation.ca.

Photo:
Back Row - Amanda-Marie Hillyard, Dale Jarvis, Carole Spicer, Winona White
Front Row - Glenda Garnier, Jean Young

This is what a trunkful of oral histories looks like.

I'm on the road today, heading to Deer Lake, where the Grand Lake Centre of Economic Development (GLCED) will be hosting its Annual General Meeting. I'm going to be talking to them about heritage projects, intangible cultural heritage, and ways in which the Heritage Foundation of NL can help communities safeguard what matters to them.

Along the way, I'm dropping off this pile of oral history material back in Grand Falls-Windsor: three crates of reel-to-reel tapes from the Hiram Silk collection, three boxes full of oral history transcripts, and another banker's box of audio recordings. We've been toiling to digitize all of this material, and the work with the physical records is now complete.

You can listen the interview I did on the Hiram Silk material here or check out all those interviews here.

The other Grand Falls-Windsor oral history interviews were featured in an article by Terra Barrett in our last newsletter. She'll be finishing up the metadata work on that shortly, and we'll post when all of it is online.

And I'm off! See you soon, Deer Lake!

Do you have a community oral history collection you want help digitizing?

Email me at ich@heritagefoundation.ca.

The heritage of craft and traditional art

In the April-May edition of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Update for Newfoundland and Labrador, we pay tribute to our traditional craftspeople, artisans, and trades workers. We give an introduction to our "Talking Shop: Metalworking" presentation organized in cooperation with The Rooms; Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador board member Doug Wells shares his father's memories of tanning nets in Muddy Hole; Amanda-Marie Hillyard brings us news on the Deer Lake Heritage Project and the work they are doing to collect local oral histories; Lisa Wilson interviews the 106-year-old carpenter Cecil Greenland in Spaniard's Bay, and Nicole Penney writes about the tradition of lumberwoods carving in Newfoundland.

Contributors: Dale Jarvis, Doug Wells, Amanda-Marie Hillyard, Lisa Wilson, and Nicole Penney.

You can download the newsletter in pdf format from:

https://archive.org/details/Ichupdate043 

(look for the PDF link on the left side of the page)

Photo: Mr. Cecil Greenland, by Lisa Wilson