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Port Union: Using the lessons of history to build for the future

How a twice-devastated community is taking advantage of its rich heritage

Port Union, Nfld., is a community that has been hit hard – twice. First, the former thriving union town was hit by the cod moratorium in 1992, which wiped out more than 1,200 jobs. But the town rebounded – sort of. In 1998, a shrimp plant went in where the old cod fish plant was and created about 200 jobs. There was hope again for more than a decade. Then in 2010, Hurricane Igor hit the small fishing community and the plant was flooded.

"With the hurricane and the flooding, it destroyed the plant so the same people were affected twice," says Edith Samson, executive coordinator of the Sir William Ford Coaker Heritage Foundation. "You don't usually get hit that hard twice."

The company said every piece of machinery was ruined and it wasn't worth rebuilding. They took the insurance money and left, forcing Port Union into a downward spiral of unemployment and despair.

But in many ways Port Union, like many outports in Newfoundland, is lucky. It has a rich history. Port Union is also helped by the fact that it's a heritage site. Capitalizing on that history to help improve the community and economy is Samson's job.

The aptly-named Port Union was as a union town. In fact, it's the only "union-built town" in North America. It was founded by William Ford Coacker in 1916 and built by members of the Fisherman's Protective Union, started by Coaker in 1908 as a solution for powerless and dispersed fishermen.

By 1914, half the fishermen in Newfoundland were members. The town was built to be the centre of activity, and by 1924 had a fish plant, its own rail line, a hotel, a movie theatre, a school and a power plant. The town had electricity in 1918, long before it became popular in Toronto in the early 1920s.

"The town was booming," Samson says about the years between the 1920s and the early 1990s. "All of the houses that we now see vacant in this heritage district would have been full at that time. It was really, really hard to find a rental in the whole community."

But the overfishing by trolling ships in the 70s and 80s led to a moratorium on cod fishing and Port Union suffered the same fate as a number of outports. By the late 1990s, most of the town's buildings were in a sad state of neglect and disrepair.

"After the cod moratorium and after the plant closed, there were 58 other businesses that closed in this area – so we've really taken a big hit," Samson says.

But today, the outlook has changed.

"Younger people are coming home with their children because they want their kids to grow up in a rural area and have access to some of the freedom they had when they were children," she says. She says people in their 20s have expressed interest in opening up businesses in the area. Samson is happy  to work with anyone willing to hang a shingle in the town and works tirelessly to create one job at a time.

So how does Samson use the history to improve the economy?

The Coaker Heritage Foundation recently acquired the rights to a number of the town's buildings and is in the process of restoring them. The main drag looks like a military town with similar-type buildings lining both sides of the street; some of the buildings look like they are brand new and some look like they are beyond repair. Paint is chipped off, glass is broken and roofs are caving in. With government grants and other donations, Samson has been working since 2001 to restore them.

Just over two years ago, ERA Architects in Toronto contacted Samson to talk about doing a project called Culture of Outports.

“We saw a listing of Canada's 10 most threatened heritage buildings in 2011, which identified the buildings on Bungalow Hill in Port Union,” says Philip Evans, principal with ERA Architects. Evans lives in Toronto but is the decedent of master shipbuilders in Newfoundland and he and his father are working on a book on the subject. “ERA is interested in how communities grow and evolve.”

The fall of Newfoundland's cod stocks and strategies since should be considered by the rest of Canada seriously. It could happen anywhere.

  Philip Evans, principal with ERA Architects

The goal of Culture of Outports is to identify cultural assets that hold value, figure out a way to use those assets as cultural economic opportunities and get the community involved in building and repairing them.

Members of the firm, along with a number of students from Ryerson University, were in the town in June to build an archway outside the main building.

“Its not just the entry to the museum – its the centre of the community,” Evans says.

It's a way of revitalizing the community because it gives people a place to congregate. It's also on the same place people used to congregate back in Coaker's day, but the new archway has a modern yet traditional look. They are capitalizing on the province's rich sense of place to build a new economy and make it a place thirtysomethings want to live.

“Creating a 'community build' setting for residents young and old, students and professionals, to connect, exchange, transform and imagine. As a cultural practice, 'community building' was responsible for creating the outport and these unique places – we believe it will also be responsible for their futures,” Evans says.

It's a sentiment Samson agrees with.

"It was an amazing experience for everyone involved ... it created excitement about being from here,” she says. "Having young people from Ontario coming and looking with that eye that 'you have something special and let’s do something with it.’ I think that gave people a sense of pride and a sense of place – where they were and where they're from."

The lessons many rural Newfoundlanders are currently learning in terms of evolving an economy may benefit other Canadians.

“Many cities or communities in Canada have been settled on natural resource economies,” Evans says. “The fall of Newfoundland's cod stocks and strategies since should be considered by the rest of Canada seriously. It could happen anywhere.”

"Rural Newfoundland is really worth saving," Samson says. "We do have something special."

This is something Evans also believes, and he's currently trying to figure out what outport to work on next. His firm has received a number of applications for their 2014 project, and Evans says the options look promising. Because of his work, he has been approached by a number of entrepreneurs and investors looking to open up shop in these communities.

“If we can match interested businesses with communities under a true private/public cultural economic strategic framework, that would be quite special and unique,” he says.

(Photos courtesy Jordan Chittley/Yahoo Canada News)