Port Union and Trinity, Newfoundland

Posted on by merryme

On this free day, I joined Fred and Robin who like to visit museums.  Luckily, so do I.

Port Union

First we stopped in the town of Port Union, the only union built town in North America.  The town was the base for the Fishermen’s Protective Union. In the 1800’s and early 1900’s, merchants did not pay cash for fish but instead advanced to the fishermen staple goods at an inflated price on credit and then took the fishermen’s cured fish at the end of the season at rates determined by the merchant   This Truck system kept most fishermen in perpetual debt to the merchant.

This area is now a part of the National Historic District of Canada and are currently be renovated.  These buildings housed a printing press, mercantile, machine shop, woodworking shop, fish plant, housing, etc. The Union would by goods at wholesale prices then sell them to the fishermen at cost.
You can see there is still a lot of work to do – a comparison of old and renovated. The Foundation is renovating and renting these out as housing and businesses.
This is a scale used to weigh a fisherman’s catch. The weights were to the right, and to the left is a cot used to transport fish. Those triangular shapes on the cod are what the shape of a cod looks like when cleaned, split then salted.
This was a jigsaw in the machine shop.
This was fascinating. These are the tips you put on a lathe to make molding and trim out of wood.

Then in among all the Union related stuff, one finds this fossil exhibit.  On the shore of this Union town was found this 560 million year old fossil, which may be the oldest fossil found in the world.  Its importance because contains the oldest evidence of muscle tissue ever found.  Everything earlier was soft bodied amoeba, coral and jellyfish type animals.  This predates the  previous walking fish fossil by quite a bit.

Haootia quadriformis
This is what they think it might have looked like.

The geology of Newfoundland is so fascinating.  One could plan an entire trip around just discovering the geological sites on this island.  This is in contrast to learning about Newfoundland’s fishing history.  I have not included here yet, but it is mentioned at almost every stop how the Canadian government banned cod fishing in 1992, and crippled Newfoundland’s economy.  A lot of people left the island because they couldn’t fish or work in the fish plants.  The ban was partially lifted only this year, which is why I was able to go cod fishing.  Some of the people are returning, we are meeting a lot of them in the tourist industry, which is picking up after COVID – bus and boat tours, concerts, whale watching, puffin watching, restaurants, RV campgrounds.  There are at least 4 Fantasy RV tours on this island right now, and they repeats these tours 4 times a season.  There is another RV company like Fantasy doing the same thing, plus we’ve run into multiple bus tours and cruise ships stopping in  St Johns.

Trinity

The next stop was a series of historic buildings in Trinity, Newfoundland.  This is an old fishing village and they’ve preserved several buildings here to show what it was like.

The first stop was the visitor center. We are starting to see these brighter colors as we near St Johns.
St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Trinity, NL.  The inside looks like a ship, much like the other churches visited in Newfoundland.
The Forge building had a working blacksmith. The interesting thing about this forge is the giant bellows behind the fire. He would pump the bellows and it would hold the air, then release it in a slow steady stream to keep the fire hot.
Ryan’s Mercantile sold almost everything – groceries, household goods and clothing and sewing supplies.

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