Badgers Quay-Valleyfield-Pools Island (inc. 1946; pop. 1976, 1468). An incorporated community composed of the contiguous settlements of Valleyfield, Pools Island, North West Arm, Southwest Island and Tinkers Island, and including residents of the resettled community of Safe Harbour qv, Badgers Quay-Valleyfield-Pools Island was first constituted a rural district rather than a town ``because part of it, namely Pools Island, was not connected by land with the rest. (Preliminary Survey-1953 Settlement Newfoundland> 1955]. With the passage of the Municipalities Act 1980) on April 1, 1980 the rural district of Badgers Quay-Valleyfield-Pools Island was created a town on that date. Like Wesleyville to the north, the town is composed of three main areas; Badgers Quay and Valleyfield are situated on the mainland of Newfoundland south of Wesleyville and Pools Island (on Main Pools Island) is situated on an island adjacent to the coast. Tinkers Island, Southwest Island and Rig Island are located between Main Pools Island and the mainland and are connected by a bridge which joins Tinkers Island with Main Pools Island. The part of the town known as Pools Island (pop. 1976, 212) is situated on Main Pools Island and has its own post office and government wharf. Another bridge joins Pig Island to the mainland and the part of the town of Valleyfield (pop. 1976, 595) is situated on the north-east side of the harbour. Here there was a government wharf and an oil tank farm in 1981. The settlement of Badgers Quay (pop. 1976, 649) situated on the mainland between Valleyfield and Pools Island (pop. 1976, 649) has the towns main post office and between Valleyfield and Badgers Quay is the northern terminus of the ferry to Greenspond. The coast in Badgers Quay is low-lying and rocky with excellent anchorages and shelter within the tickles and coves formed by the numerous islands, its sheltered areas including Odds Island, Grassey Island, Benburry Islet and Puddingbag Cove. Settlement in Badger s Quay-Valleyfield-Pools Island began on Pools Island, called Fools Island until the 1850s. The island, like Greenspond, the Gooseberry Islands, the Fair Islands, the Flat Islands and the islands about Cape Freels, was visited in the late 1700s and settled about 1800 by landbased seal fishermen and inshore cod fishermen. According to Chesley W. Sanger (1977) these headland and island locations in northern Bonavista Bay were situated along the principal migration route of the harp seal and emerged as the foci of the land-based seal hunt of the early 18s. Pools Island was first settled by English fishermen and their families who came to the island via Bonavista, Salvage, Barrow Harbour and the Flat Islands in the early 18s. E.R. Seary (1976) lists Anne Jeans as a resident in 1815. By 1821 William Knee (later a sealing captain out of Greenspond) was listed as resident and by 1823 Jacob Preston had come to Fools Island. In 1830 infants named Jane Barfet and Sarah Feltham were baptized on Fool s Island, as were James Gillingham (aged thirty five), Nathaniel King (aged twenty-three) and Thomas Brown (aged eighteen). John Sheppard was baptized (aged forty-three) in 1843 and John Janes (Jeans?) is listed as resident in 1846. In the 1800s other families--named Kean, Ayles, Pope, Dalton and Davis--came to Pools Island, many of them from Flowers Island. Lovells Newfoundland Directory (1871) lists a number of new family names - Hallett, Hoskins, Holloway, House, Howell, Dick, Kent, Stoke, and Rogers--(some of them Roman Catholic) who came to Pool s Island via the Roman Catholic communities on the west side of the Bonavista Peninsula although there was a small number of Roman Catholics (nine of 112) recorded in the first census of the settlement reported in 1836. According to the Census, 1845, there was a church and school operating on Pools Island, and according to the Census, 1857, the church was Roman Catholic. Between 1845 and 1869 the population of Pools Island rose dramatically, from 177 to 524. This tremendous rise can be accounted for by the growth of the Labrador seal hunt. According to Sanger (1977) there was a preference by the late 1800s, on the part of steam-vessel owners, to hire experienced sealing captains from the most northerly communities. This meant that the Labrador sealing capitals spread from St. Johns and Conception Bay north to Pools Island, Badgers Quay and the Cape Settlements of Brookfield and Wesleyville. Pools Island became the point of congregation for schooners bound for Labrador from the 18s to the early 1900s and these ships, moored on the north side of the tickle ``three abreast, were then sent off with a special Sealing Service held in St. James Church (consecrated by Bishop Edward Feild in 1865), a custom which ended in 1918 (Abner Kean, quoted in DA: Dec. 1976). However, the growth of Pools Island led consequently to the settlement of the adjacent mainland as the small island could no longer accommodate its growing population. Badgers Quay was first recorded in the census in 1891 as Badgers Key and with a population of eighty-seven; Valleyfield was listed in the same census as the Northwest Arm and had approximately eleven families living there. According to Marlene and Otis Burton (1971) the Valleyfield area was settled on the north and south sides of the inlet by families from Greenspond and Pools Island. According to oral tradition the first settlers were James and Thomas Ricketts (of Seal Cove, White Bay), William Welcher and Christopher and John Stratton (of Greenspond), Peter and James Burry and, in the 1800s, Abraham, Samuel and Abel Stratton. Later, in the early 1900s, other families - Winter, Starkes, Sturge, Kean, Blackmore, Hunt and Roberts - came from Pools Island, Flowers Island, Cape Island and Wesleyville. By 1901 there was a Church of England school in Badgers Quay (called Badger Bay in that Census) and by 1903, through the efforts of Charles Stratton who walked to Pools Island, to Lumsden (a distance of about twenty miles), and across the ice to Greenspond, canvassing for money to help build a school (Barter and Burton: 1971), a school was built in Valleyfield. The schools at Pools Island, Badgers Quay and Valleyfield that had been built by the early 1900s were replaced by a series of new schools built in Badgers Quay and Valleyfield to serve the Anglican and United Church families, and, in the 1950s, the small Pentecostal congregation. In 1961 the Badgers Quay Anglican and the Valleyfield United Church School integrated with Kindergarten to Grade Three attending the school in Valleyfield, and Grades Three to Seven attending the newly-built school in Badgers Quay. A Methodist church was built in Valleyfield in 1903 and there was also a Methodist chapel on Pools Island. In 1933 a new United Church was built in Valleyfield and in 1951 a Pentecostal Church was built in North West Arm. This church was floated to Valleyfield in 1956 when North West Arm was abandoned; a new church was built in 1957. Although the land-based seal hunt and later the Labrador seal hunt were the main reasons for the settlement of these communities, it did not sustain them after 1920. After the decline in the Labrador fishery families turned to the inshore fishery (cod, capelin, squid, herring and some lobster) or to logging. In 1930 a salt-fish plant was built on South West Island, which was later taken over by Fishery Products, Ltd. Fish had also been sold to local merchants or at Wesleyville and Greenspond. Sawmilling, mainly pit-props, and pulpwood-cutting for large firms in central Newfoundland and for the Bowater operation at Indian Bay became important sources of income. At this time the North West Arm families were resettled in Valleyfield, and South West Island and Tinkers Island were connected to Badgers Quay by bridges. In the 1950s Badgers Quay itself became the community through which the Straight Shore highroad passed, resulting in a centralization of services in that community, which was then linked to communities as far north as Deadmans Bay. Between 1954 and 1955 the remaining nineteen families of Safe Harbour resettled in Badgers Quay under the Centralization Program. After the early 1900s fishing, fish-plant work and service industry jobs were the main sources of employment in Badgers Quay-Valleyfield-Pools Island; a devastating forest fire in 1961 all but wiped out the forestry industry. In 1957 an experimental fish plant had opened which operated until 1966 and employed from thirty to forty people. In 1967 this plant was leased as a commercial operation and became the economic mainstay of the town. In 1981 the plant, which first processed mostly salt fish, was a fresh-frozen operation which employed about 200 people at peak operation. All fish was bought from local inshore fishermen and the plants main products were groundfish (frozen and shipped to the United States), some salt fish (sold to the Canadian Salt Fish Corporation), herring, lumproe, crab and meal (DA: Dec. 1976). In 1981 Badgers Quay was the site of a branch of the Protection Division of Fisheries and Marine Service for the Department of Fisheries. All the grassy, rock strewn islands and coastlines of Badgers Quay-Valleyfield-Pools Island were connected by bridges, and most roads were paved. The town was governed by a town council. • Burton and Burton (1971), • C.W. Sanger (1977), • E.R. Seary (1976), • Census (1836-1976), • Lovells Newfoundland Directory (1871), • Newfoundland Fisheries Settlement Survey (1952), • Sailing Directions Newfoundland (1980), • Western Newfoundland Settlement Survey--1953 (Preliminary Report) Valleyfield (1955).
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 21:02:47 +0000
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