10/12/2026
In Newfoundland's vanished outports, the Orange lodge dinners of my childhood, and the people who never entirely left.
By Stephanie Hodge
I was sitting in New York watching Below on Netflix when I began to suspect that somebody had stolen the St. Anthony telephone directory, thrown in a sea monster, and sold the whole bloody thing to television.
Penney. Biles. Noseworthy. Budgell. Mooney. Pike. Tulk. Puddister. Crocker. Mercer.
Holy s**t, that's home.
There they were, the names I had grown up with, attached to people who spoke in those familiar northern Newfoundland rhythms, where a person could deliver a fairly devastating assessment of your entire family without appearing to say anything particularly unkind. A raised eyebrow, a little intake of breath, a carefully placed my dear, and you could find yourself dismissed along with three generations of your ancestors before the kettle had boiled. The finest practitioners could ruin a man's reputation with the observation that he was "some wonderful."
I grew up in St. Anthony, at the northern tip of Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula, where the land runs out of patience and the Strait of Belle Isle takes over. It is a country of rock, wind, ice, tuckamore, and a summer so brief that people have been known to speak of it in the past tense while it is still happening. On a fine day, when the water lies blue beneath the cliffs and the icebergs drift past like visiting dignitaries who have lost their way, there is nowhere more beautiful on earth. On a bad day, the wind comes across the Strait with such conviction that you begin to wonder whether the whole peninsula might eventually be blown across to Labrador.
People settled there anyway, which tells you something about the human appetite for hardship, or perhaps simply about the price of fish.
I remember the Orange lodge dinners in the 1970s, although I had no idea then that I was sitting among the witnesses to a world already beginning to disappear. To a child, these gatherings were simply part of life, occasions when people came together under the banner of institutions whose origins lay somewhere beyond the horizon, in countries and conflicts I knew almost nothing about.
I cannot claim to have understood the Battle of the Boyne or the long religious quarrels of Ireland, and I suspect most children at a lodge dinner were considerably more interested in what was being served and how long the speeches might continue. But I remember the gatherings, the sense of an older social world still alive around them, and the importance that people attached to coming together.
Only now do I understand that those dinners were not merely social occasions. They were places where communities remembered themselves, where old loyalties were renewed, stories were repeated, and people maintained connections to families and settlements whose histories reached back generations.
My grandfather George Taylor, a fisherman from Raleigh, belonged to the Orange Order. His family, according to our family history, had moved north from somewhere around St. John's in search of better fishing.
I have always loved that explanation. Better fishing. Two words capable of moving an entire Newfoundland family hundreds of miles along a coastline, persuading people to leave familiar places, build houses in unfamiliar ones, and spend the rest of their lives explaining why they had come there in the first place.
George married my grandmother, a Bartlett from L'Anse aux Meadows, and together their lives became part of the complicated web of families, churches, fishing grounds, and small settlements along the Great Northern Peninsula.
Newfoundland's outports were never simply collections of houses placed wherever somebody found a promising place to catch cod. They grew through networks of merchants, fishing crews, relatives, and religious communities, and those networks influenced who settled where, whom they married, where they worshipped, and which people were considered to belong.
Much of the English settlement came from the West Country, particularly Dorset, Devon, and Somerset, while many Irish settlers came from the southeast of Ireland, especially Waterford and Wexford. Over generations these movements helped produce a distinctive religious geography, with strong Irish Catholic communities in parts of the southern Avalon Peninsula and predominantly Protestant settlements across many northern and northeastern coastal areas.
There were exceptions everywhere, of course. Newfoundland was never quite as tidy as the people drawing its boundaries might have preferred. But in the little outports, religion could be part of the architecture of everyday life. One community might be Anglican, another Methodist, another Catholic, and the distinction could shape schooling, marriage, charitable institutions, and social relationships.
A young man might find a perfectly suitable girl in the next cove, only to discover that the real difficulty was not the weather, the distance, or her father's opinion of his prospects, but the fact that one family went to the Catholic church and the other to the Methodist chapel.
And if you think Newfoundland families were inclined to forget such matters quickly, you have clearly never listened to a conversation beginning with the words, "Well, I don't know if you ever heard what happened there..."
The Orange Order belonged to this world, carrying with it a history rooted in the religious and political divisions of Ireland, where Protestant identity, loyalty to the British Crown, and conflict with Catholic communities had become deeply entangled. In Newfoundland, Orange lodges became important in many Protestant settlements, offering fellowship, mutual support, ceremony, and social gatherings, while sometimes also reinforcing the divisions between religious communities.
I wonder what all this meant to George Taylor. Did he understand the history of the Orange Order in Ireland, or had its original political significance become something more distant, preserved in ceremonies, lodge meetings, and the familiar habits of belonging? Was membership an expression of faith, family tradition, loyalty, or simply part of the social world into which he had been born?
I do not know. But I remember the dinners, and I find it extraordinary that an institution born from centuries of religious conflict could arrive in northern Newfoundland and become part of a child's memory of people gathering around tables, telling stories, and maintaining a world whose original meanings were already beginning to fade.
On my father's side, meanwhile, were the Williamses of Current Island, near Plum Point, a little piece of land along the Strait of Belle Isle that seems almost too small to support an entire family history, yet somehow managed to do exactly that.
I have often wondered what the first Williams who settled there thought he was doing, whether he found a sheltered landing place and good fishing and concluded that the rest of the arrangements would sort themselves out, which is as plausible an explanation for the settlement of Newfoundland as any I have encountered.
The Williamses married into other families along the Strait, and my grandmother married James Hodge in Savage Cove, another of those northern communities where the sea determined the working day and the weather frequently determined whether there would be a working day at all.
And there, along that same coast, is Nameless Cove, where our family graves lie.
I have always thought Nameless Cove a wonderfully Newfoundland name, because here is a place apparently without a name, holding the names of people whose lives made mine possible. The living have scattered across the world, acquiring new addresses and occupations and occasionally developing the impression that they have become rather important, while the dead have remained exactly where they were put, apparently unimpressed by the whole business.
My grandfather James made a journey that must have seemed extraordinary from Savage Cove when he undertook training aboard a ship near Gibraltar, travelling from the cold waters of northern Newfoundland to the Mediterranean, where the sun was considerably more reliable and the climate must have seemed almost indecently generous.
According to our family history, he contracted malaria during that period, although whether it had anything to do with the illness that later killed him remains uncertain. He returned to Savage Cove, but died at thirty-nine, leaving my grandmother with five children, including my father, and a problem that would have been enough to knock the wind out of anybody.
My grandmother, however, appears to have been a woman who regarded difficulties as something to be dealt with rather than discussed at great length.
She went to St. Anthony, took a job as matron of the children's home at the Grenfell Mission under Dr. Charles Curtis, and brought all five of her children with her.
Now, there's a woman.
She had lost her husband, had five children to feed, and lived in a part of Newfoundland where opportunities for widows were not exactly falling out of the sky, so she went to work in an orphanage and took the children along, a solution so practical and so magnificently audacious that I cannot help admiring it.
I have often imagined her arriving at the Grenfell Mission, gathering the children and whatever possessions she could manage, looking around at the institution and the considerable amount of work ahead of her, and deciding that the only sensible thing was to get on with it.
There was no time for a grand speech about resilience, and I suspect she would have considered the modern fashion for discussing one's personal journey a fairly extravagant waste of an afternoon when there were children to feed and sheets to wash.
The Grenfell Mission, established through the work of Sir Wilfred Grenfell, had become one of the great institutions of northern Newfoundland, providing medical care, education, and support to communities where isolation and poverty were part of ordinary life. Dr. Charles Curtis was one of its important medical leaders, and somewhere within that institutional history was my grandmother, running a children's home while raising five of her own.
Official histories naturally concentrate on the doctors, the buildings, and the distinguished people who founded things, but I find myself increasingly interested in the women who kept those things functioning, who organized meals, washed clothes, cared for children, and managed the daily disorder of human life while the important men were having their photographs taken.
My grandmother was one of those women.
And what strikes me now is that she had carried out her own form of resettlement long before the government decided that moving people around the Newfoundland coastline ought to become an official policy.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Newfoundland introduced programmes encouraging people to leave isolated settlements and relocate to larger centres, where schools, hospitals, roads, and employment could be provided more efficiently.
The arguments were not unreasonable. Life in these places could be extraordinarily difficult, and nobody who has experienced the uncertainty of northern coastal life would seriously suggest that children should be denied proper schooling or that families should be left without medical care simply to preserve a picturesque collection of houses on a map.
But the policy also reflected a particular understanding of progress, one in which the value of a community could be measured largely through the cost of delivering services, while the relationships, knowledge, religious institutions, and shared histories that made those places meaningful were considerably harder to account for.
The solution was to move the people.
And because this was Newfoundland, some of them took their houses.
Not the furniture or the curtains or the good china that came out when the minister visited, but the actual houses, which were prepared for towing and hauled across the water to new locations, an image so extraordinary that it would be almost comic if it did not also represent the dismantling of entire communities.
Between 1965 and 1970, more than 16,000 Newfoundlanders from 119 communities moved under the federal-provincial resettlement programme, and the geography of the island began to change.
Along the Great Northern Peninsula and its neighbouring bays, places such as Lock's Cove, Ireland's Bight, Little Brehat, Williamsport, and Hooping Harbour became part of the larger history of communities confronting isolation, declining populations, and the pressure to relocate.
Lock's Cove, on Hare Bay, eventually emptied as families moved to St. Anthony, Cook's Harbour, and Main Brook, while Ireland's Bight and Little Brehat also lost their permanent populations.
Hooping Harbour, on the eastern side of the peninsula, offers a particularly revealing example of how religion and resettlement could become intertwined. Methodism had been important there, but the Apostolic Faith Church later became influential, and its pastor, Booth Reid, played a significant role in persuading residents to relocate after attempts to have the community recognized as a growth centre failed.
When a community disappeared, it was not only the houses that were lost. The chapel, the school, the lodge, the familiar pews, the burial grounds, and the patterns of family life were all affected, sometimes surviving in new places and sometimes disappearing altogether.
Some people welcomed the opportunity to leave, particularly those who had spent years struggling with isolation and inadequate services, while others were reluctant to abandon places where their families had lived for generations. Many must have experienced the complicated mixture of relief and grief that accompanies a decision that is both necessary and painful.
I have spent much of my professional life working in international development and evaluation, and perhaps that is why I find the history of Newfoundland resettlement so compelling. Governments and development institutions are very good at counting the things that can be counted, and less comfortable with the things that cannot be fitted neatly into a table.
We can calculate the cost of maintaining a school in an isolated community, estimate the savings associated with moving families closer to hospitals, and measure improvements in roads and employment. But what is the value of a neighbour who has known your family for three generations, or of a fisherman who understands every dangerous current along a coastline, or of a community where children grow up surrounded by people who know their parents, their grandparents, and the stories of those who came before them?
And what happens to that knowledge when the community is scattered across different towns?
I do not suggest that resettlement was simply wrong. The people who left had their own ambitions, frustrations, and legitimate desires for better lives. But a place can become economically inconvenient without becoming humanly insignificant, and a community can disappear from the census without disappearing from the lives of the people who belonged to it.
My grandmother understood something about this, although I doubt she would have expressed it in the language of development theory. When she left Savage Cove, she did not preserve the house, the neighbourhood, or the familiar view across the water, but she preserved the family, carrying five children into a new life and taking with them something of the place from which they came.
The Williamses had done something similar in their movements from Current Island and along the Strait of Belle Isle. On the other side of the family, the Bartels and Taylors carried their own histories along the coast, bringing with them the old Protestant traditions, the Orange Order, and the peculiar mixture of ambition and stubbornness that seems to have persuaded generations of Newfoundlanders to establish households in places where the weather alone might reasonably have discouraged them.
I have lived and worked in countries all over the world, spent years in international institutions, and written more evaluation reports than any sensible person should be required to produce in one lifetime, yet I find myself increasingly interested in these tiny Newfoundland communities that would barely register in a national development plan.
Perhaps it is because I have come to suspect that the most important things about human life are not always the things we have learned to measure.
I think about the Williamses on Current Island, about James Hodge travelling to Gibraltar and returning to Savage Cove, about his death at thirty-nine, and about my grandmother arriving at the Grenfell Mission with five children and the determination to make a life for them.
I think about George Taylor, the fisherman whose family apparently moved north in search of better fishing, and about my Bartel grandmother from L'Anse aux Meadows, whose life became part of the story of Raleigh and the families who made their homes along that coast.
And I think about those lodge dinners in the 1970s, the people gathered around tables, the old traditions still being observed, the stories circulating among families whose histories reached back to Ireland and England and the little fishing settlements that had grown along Newfoundland's coastline.
I wonder how many of the people who attended those dinners understood that they were witnessing the gradual disappearance of a social world that had once seemed permanent, and how many simply assumed that there would always be another dinner, another gathering, another familiar face across the table.
That is perhaps the peculiar cruelty of memory. We rarely know when we are experiencing something for the last time, and by the time we understand what has disappeared, the people who could explain it to us are often gone.
I think about Nameless Cove, where the graves remain, while the living have gone on to become all manner of things in all manner of places.
The coastline is still there, indifferent to our comings and goings, the sea moving into the coves as it always has, the wind crossing the Strait of Belle Isle with its customary disregard for human arrangements. Some of the old settlements have become seasonal places, others have nearly vanished beneath grass and scrub, and in a few there is little to suggest that generations of people once lived entire lives there.
But the names remain.
So do the families.
And sometimes, quite unexpectedly, the memory of a place comes back through a voice, a surname, an expression, or the sight of a little Newfoundland community on a television screen thousands of miles from home.
Which brings me back to Below, and the fictional threat beneath the ocean, because I have come to think that the real history of Newfoundland's small communities contains enough tragedy, comedy, stubbornness, and extraordinary human invention to occupy a writer for several lifetimes without the assistance of a single supernatural creature.
We had the fishery, the weather, the sea, government policy, the religious divisions that travelled across the Atlantic, and the occasional disastrous decision made by somebody who ought to have known better, which was more than sufficient to keep things interesting.
And we had people like my grandmother, who found herself widowed with five children and decided that the sensible response was to move to St. Anthony and run an orphanage.
I would still like to walk Current Island, visit the graves at Nameless Cove, and learn more about the people whose lives unfolded along that coast, because somewhere among those places is the history of how I came to be here, and because I suspect that the most important things we inherit are not always the things our ancestors intended to leave us.
Perhaps it is simply the knowledge that they were there, that they lived, loved, quarrelled, worked, endured, and made decisions whose consequences travelled much farther than they could ever have imagined.
And perhaps that is the real problem with the word resettlement, which sounds so complete, so orderly, so reassuringly administrative, when the truth is that people may leave a place without ever entirely departing from it.
The houses go, the roads change, the schools close, the churches lose their congregations, the lodge dinners become memories, and the population figures eventually fall to zero, but somewhere a granddaughter is still thinking about the Williamses of Current Island, James Hodge and his journey to Gibraltar, the woman who carried five children into the Grenfell Mission, the Bartels of L'Anse aux Meadows, George Taylor and his Orange Order loyalties, and the family graves at Nameless Cove.
The government could move the living.
The dead were still at Nameless Cove.
And the rest of us, it turns out, have been trying to find our way back ever since.
Stephanie Hodge
For the Williamses of Current Island, the Hodges of Savage Cove, the Bartlettes of L'Anse aux Meadows, the Taylors of Raleigh, the family buried at Nameless Cove, and all the people whose little Newfoundland communities have disappeared from the map but not from memory.
*If your family came from one of the old settlements along the Great Northern Peninsula, I would love to hear its story. These histories are too good, too strange, and too important to lose
