Ten Historic Towns: The Architecture of Town and Outport By: Shane O'Dea

Outport houses generally have a center-hall plan although the main door is seldom used. The principal main is through the back porch into the kitchen which, in most cases, was the most used room of the house. Among the significant factors in house plan is the size and situation of the chimney. Early houses tended to have massive central chimneys with open fireplaces large enough to sit in. By the beginning of the Nineteenth Century these had disappeared from houses built by people of English origin but remained in the houses of the Irish until at least 1850. The Nineteenth Century English house tends to use separate chimneys set at the gable ends of the house.

Roof-form also varies with race, the Irish tending to build with the hipped-roof, the English using the gabled-roof. This is not, of course, an absolute statement as examples can be found of gabled Irish houses and of hipped English (e.g. Abbott's in Bonavista). It is possible that the hipped-roof may have come from the thatched roof which was frequently hipped for better protection against the weather.

Structurally most Newfoundland houses and buildings are timber-framed. However, a very common mode of construction was full-studded or tilt construction. This involved the setting of vertical logs, placed side-by-side, into an earth trench (in the case of rough buildings) or into a wooden sill (in the case of houses). While extremely wasteful of timber it did produce a strong, warm house. Full-studded construction survived well into the Twentieth Century and is, in fact, a remarkable survival of an early medieval building practice. It was used in all forms of buildings -- houses, stores, cabins, military structures -- and by every class and nationality in Newfoundland.

The decoration of Newfoundland houses varies from community to community and depends on the skills and interests of local craftspeople. It is fairly clear that in Grand Bank a degree of wealth allowed people to make use of designs taken from architectural pattern books and, in some cases, to import ready-made detail. In Bonavista there were a number of local people who were skilled in housebuilding and enhanced their structures with fanciful decoration. The window treatments of Bonavista are well worth observation for their variety and form. In other places another feature will be emphasized. To use an example not covered in this book one would look at Branch on the Cape Shore where elaborate overdoor detail distinguishes most houses in the community and is a remarkable example of folk-decoration.

The churches of Newfoundland, like the houses, tend to be simple in form and decoration. Until about 1850 it was not really possible to distinguish between the buildings of the.~different denominations. After 1850 there appears (although this is a somewhat tentative conclusion) to be a tendency for Anglican churches to use a Gothic Revival style, Catholic churches to use a Renaissance Revival style. The presumed cause of this is the style chosen by the cathedrals of the two denominations in St. John's where the Anglican was designed by George Gilbert Scott in an Early English form of the Gothic Revival, and the Catholic was designed by John Jones in a Renaissance form. From the major structures the styles spread through the country.

Of the early churches little is known. The late Eighteenth Century Anglican Church at Placentiawas, like its Catholic counterpart, a small, low building with a hipped roof and tower. Essentially this church was no more than an ordinary cottage with tower attached. The use of galleries was acceptable in Anglican churches until the 1850's when Bishop Feild, in his ardent Gothic Revivalism, "encouraged" their removal. Such furniture was not, however, anathema in Catholic or Methodist churches. And, while Georgian classicism required the use of segmental-arched windows, pilasters and columns, the pointed arch of the Gothic form never really died out.

The expense of building a tower made many churches indistinguishable from other buildings in the community except for the fact that they had gable-end entries. In some cases it is only possible to tell an Orange Lodge from a Catholic church by the colour each is painted.

Public and institutional buildings were rare before 1830. Public buildings were limited to the occasional gaol of which little style was expected. Schools varied in size according to the community but generally occupied church halls or lodges of the fraternal orders. Two major schools were built at Harbour Grace and Carbonear prior to 1850 and were essentially large hipped-roof houses. The most obvious institutional buildings in any community were the lodges of the Masons, the Orange Order and the Society of United Fishermen. These were generally large buildings rivalling the churches in size. Their decoration varied from simply painted emblems and signs to the elaborate carved details found on halls like that at Twillingate. One of the most unusual is that of the S.U.F. in the abandoned community of Pass Island, Fortune Bay where the dormer windows are triangular to accommodate the shape of the society emblem.

Towards the end of the Nineteenth Century the major towns of Newfoundland were given public buildings. These generally contained a court house, jail and other governmental offices. They all took a similar form: a structure of three storeys With the third storey in the mansard roof and a mansard roofed tower set off-centre on the facade.

Commercial buildings tended to be functional and to be distinguishable from houses only in the expanse of their main-floor windows. There is a strong persistence of classicism in commercial buildings—a classicism manifested in the use of pilasters about the doors and windows. They may be the product of a desire on the part of the entrepreneur to impress his customers and creditors with his financial and moral stability which classical forms, because of their noble and ancient ancestry, had come to suggest. The brick commercial architecture erected in St.John's after the 1892 fire had no outport counterpart. The next development there was to move to the use of low-pitch roof and boom-town front (found on buildings whose facade has been carried up over the roof line to suggest a higher, more impressive structure). Grand Bank has the most complete streetcape in this fashion.

The great change in styles at the end of the Nineteenth Century did not come to many of the towns and outports because most of them had stabilized (in terms of development) by about 1850. Having built substantial structures then there was little need and, in the economic Newfoundlander's view, no need to replace them for the sake of fashion. Hence the Second Empire and Queen Anne styles which came into St. John's at the end of the Century were slow to appear in the outports. This has meant that when outport buildings survive they are generally older than those in the capital. In fact, if one is to find the roots of Newfoundland architecture one must go to the outports where a more stable pattern of existence has permitted the survival of its heritage.