Newfoundlanders are increasingly navigating the history of resettlement in the province as people return to abandoned communities through tourism
Brian Avery, pictured by his boat in Hickman's Harbour, N.L., launched a business taking tourists to the resettled Newfoundland community of Deer Harbour.Brian Avery was three years old when he and his parents packed their belongings into a boat and pulled away from Deer Harbour, N.L., leaving behind their home, their way of life and centuries of family history.
“It was a lot of years before they went back, a lot of years before anybody went back. You don’t want to go back to something that hurts,” Avery said of his parents and other residents. More than 16,000 people were resettled between 1965 and 1970, leaving behind nearly 120 communities, according to Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador. Some houses holding generations of stories were left standing, empty and intact. Others were lifted up and set afloat to be pulled by boat to the owners’ new communities.
The people interested in visiting these towns often have family history in the area, Collins said. Earlier this year, the company took a man living in Ontario to the abandoned community of Newport to spread his father’s ashes on a family grave. “It changed his life,” Avery said. “He had a new sense of purpose because now he’s back to where his roots and his home was, and he can relive all that again.”
Avery said he was careful to talk to families with ties to Deer Harbour before launching the business, to be sure they approved of him bringing strangers to the long-isolated town. He wanted to make sure they understood his vision, and that they approved of him sharing the town’s history – a history that is ultimately about the people who lived there, he said.
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