Publication Information
- Publication Date :
- Sept 12, 1997
About TURBULENT TIDES: A Social History of Sandy Point
Don Downer - 1997
This book is about Sandy Point, once the largest
settlement on the West Coast of Newfoundland. It is also about the ecology and natural
resources of the Bay St. George, the stories and folklore of the people of Sandy Point,
the struggle to maintain a community on a sand spit subject to periodic flooding and the
multicultural and multilingual nature of the population of Sandy Point and the region. It
is also about its slow painful death which took a century to complete.
Sandy Point in Bay St. George lost its last two permanent residents in 1973 -- just over two hundred years after it began as a community of white Europeans around 1780. The only evidence today that people once lived there are concrete foundations and a walkway; scattered pieces of iron, lumber and bricks and, three graveyards.
The community became part of the French Shore with the Treaty of Versailles in 1783 which shifted the Treaty Shore boundaries to include the West Coast of Newfoundland. Although it acquired a unique multilingual and multicultural mix of mainly English, Jersey Island and French settlers, as well as of Micmac aboriginals; it was never a totally secure place to live. The population fluctuated over two centuries and the attrition which began after a population peak in 1855, continued for more than a hundred years. The Micmac, who preceded the Europeans as permanent settlers by about two decades, arrived from Nova Scotia around 1760. They very quickly assimilated into the predominantly white European culture and are now only beginning to reclaim their past.
During August 1855, at its peak population of 750 people, Sandy Point bustled and clanged with men on wharves and in the fish stages and sheds along the waterfront. In a flurry of motion and noise fishing boats and schooners came and went in St. George's Harbour, women worked in vegetable and flower gardens and called to children playing around the wharves and the roads and older people talked while they made hay in the flat fields.
Sandy Point for more than sixty years, from around 1840 to 1900, was the centre of religion and commerce for the whole of the West Coast of Newfoundland. It began to lose its permanent population soon after 1855 but it retained a look of prosperity into the 1940s and 1950s, with less than a quarter of its peak population. During the 1960s with the closing of the Anglican school, several other families left.
The community got its first school and church in the mid-nineteenth century. Others, including medical, postal, customs, ferry, magistrate and police services, all came during the next fifty until the beginning of the twentieth century. The arrival of the railway in 1898 at St. George's, coupled with storm losses along the flat sand spit, signaled the end of the community. Within a short time the convent and the seat of the Roman Catholic Church were moved to St. George's, a doctor was lost, the Roman Catholic school closed and several other public services ceased. The drain of people, like blood from an open wound, accelerated the ultimate demise of the community. The last straw came in 1951 when a vicious storm carved out 'The Gap' in the peninsula which joined the community to Flat Bay; this severed the road link to the 'mainland'. The Gap, which could never be repaired, became another major factor influencing the final resettlement.
From the end of the First to the beginning of the Second World War, British naval ships on patrol in the Western Atlantic visited Sandy Point over several days during the summer months. There sailors and officers relaxed, caught salmon on Harry's River, played golf and rugby on the flat sandy land, entertained the children with games of 'paper chase', enjoyed dances and times in the church hall and rowed in regattas staged between the sailors and the locals.
Older 'Sand Scratchers', the real Sandy Point residents, recall that as children they swam in ocean water and lay on the fine sandy beaches, caught the ferry boat run by Priam Power to St. George's, hauled wood over harbour ice from Flat Bay and Barachois Brook, walked to Black Bank over the frozen harbour and helped harvest bumper crops of potatoes and hay from the sandy soil. They remember too the ice boats which reached speeds of up to forty miles an hour and the two-story fish sheds along the waterfront built by visiting Codroy fishing families who lived in the upper stories. They know they have been part of a unique community and culture, once of major importance on the West Coast of Newfoundland, and a way of life which is rapidly disappearing.
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