The premises were originally owned by Jeffrey and Street of Poole, Dorset. Benjamin Lester of Poole next acquired the business and it passed from him to his son-in-law George Garland. It was Garland who gave it to John Slade the person who, one presumes, erected the earlier buildings including the office, bookkeeper's house, salt store, coal store and cooper shops. These buildings, with Bleak House, are presumed to date from the period 1816- 1860. Abo.ut 1860 John Owen acquired the business and brought in Henry J. Earle to work with him. When Owen retired to England in 1897 the Earles began their seventy-year running of the trade. Under the Earles the operation expanded to the canning and the freezing of fish. The collapse of the Labrador fishery as well as the depletion of fish stocks in Notre Dame Bay brought about the end of the Earle business in Fogo.

Of the buildings themselves the oldest is probably the office with its gambrel roof and hipped porch. In the west wall of the porch is a fanlit window which, with the other features, suggests that the building could date from about 1820. Its gambrel roof and those on the other buildings are fairly typical of Nineteenth Century fish premises. The 1913 retail store has one of the most extraordinary commercial facades in Newfoundland. A composition of various fretwork details, brackets, cornices and diagonal boarding, it is the work of a carpenter happy with his saw.