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Little Bay’s Food Culture

In this piece I'll demonstrate how the food supply of the late 19th century town of Little Bay, Newfoundland was embedded in the larger colonial shipping system. Little Bay was a company town which grew out of a mining boom in Northern Newfoundland. ...

Post Office

The building was shabby: a cramped two-story thing. A notice posted on the door instructed the public that business would only be transacted out of a small side window. The Post Office was inside, sharing the space with the town’s surgery. The squat ...

St. Patrick Bell

A Bell Named St. Patrick

Culture is made physical by the things we create. There is nothing quite like the history of an object.  Artifacts connect us to a history that we can touch, see, and hear. Much of Little Bay’s physical history was lost to the fires but some historic ...

20-11-26_Feature

Vessels of Little Bay

Little Bay was visited by a mixture of steamers and sailing vessels. Many of the steamers were the cutting edge of technology. They loaded up on ore for Swansea in Whales where they would unload it alongside ships from the other colonies. Little Bay ...

Little Bay Mines

Little Bay Mine (1878-1903)

I’ve decided to explore the history of the Little Bay mine itself in this piece. However, I didn’t want to tell it from the perspective of the owners or managers and instead opted to focus on the experience of the mine from the point of view of the m ...

20-08-25_MiningMoney_Feature

Mining Money

If you were a miner working in Little Bay during the late 19th century you would have had a lot of places to spend your hard earned wages. In this piece I’m going to explore the financial side of the miner’s life by considering the movement of their ...

20-01-15_Feature

A Tinsmith’s Tale

The first tinsmith in Little Bay was a man named Robert Malcolm. He is first documented in the town in 1882. He was married to Catherine Morisey and the couple had four children. In the late 1880s Little Bay was experiencing something referred to as ...

20-01-03_Feature

Mine Manager E.C. Wallace

Little Bay was a prosperous and cosmopolitan town in the 19th century. It was unusual for its time and place. However, while there was variety in its resident’s nationalities and a mixture of languages could be heard spoken on its streets, the popula ...

19-12-27_Feature

Big Dan Courtney

Daniel “Big Dan” Courtney was the proprietor of the Little Bay Hotel. He came to Little Bay from Halifax and first appears in my sources in May of 1885. Innkeepers of the time were big men. They had to be. Big Dan was the exception. He wasn’t a lar ...

19-12-20_Feature

Baron Franz von Ellershausen

The Baron drew me in. I’d started researching my mother’s hometown of Little Bay while working on her genealogy. Growing up I’d often heard it said there that the town had once been one of the biggest on the island but the true scale of the history ...