Fogo Island man preserving history with 150-year-old church restoration

Inside the old St. Patrick’s Church in Stag Harbour, on Fogo Island, Roland Wells can feel the history of the nearly 150-year-old building.

As he restores the building, which was built in the late 1800s, Wells sees scuff marks on the floors and where parishioners leaned on the backs of the church’s pews.

“When you go in, you see where people leaned against the pew, and you see the wear in that pew, and you know that people leaned against that when they were celebrating weddings, when they were attending funerals, baptisms,” said Wells.

“Somebody leaned there and said, ‘I’m not well, and this is probably the last time I’m going to be in this church,’ and that stuff is important.”

The sense of history that you can feel in every piece of wood and every chair is what he loves about old buildings.

It’s what Wells liked about restoring his grandfather’s home on Fogo Island, and now it’s what makes restoring St. Patrick’s an important project to him.

“It’s physical history as opposed to just being a building without experiences,” he said. “You can’t walk through all of those buildings without understanding the lives that built, constructed, supported, moved, and rebuilt it.

“That’s a lot of our local history, and you tear that down, you cannot recreate it.”

Before Wells got his hands on it in Stag Harbour, St. Peter’s story started elsewhere in the area.

According to his research, it was built on the Eastern Indian Islands, a group of islands near Fogo, in the early 1880s. It served the people of those communities for the next seven decades until residents started leaving the community.

The migration started after an event locals called “the Great Washout” caused flooding in the 1920s and continued until the 1950s.

St. Peter’s work didn’t finish there, though. The church was dismantled piece by piece, moved to Stag Harbour on Fogo’s southern tip, then rebuilt.

“When I got into the building, well, I just fell in love with it,” said Wells. “The windows are gorgeous. The light that comes in is gorgeous, and when I say these buildings are humble, they really are.”

Wells’ work to maintain a piece of Fogo’s history started six weeks ago when he purchased the property.

Since then, he’s put in a couple of drainage ditches, shored up the foundations, and he’s started stripping off the old siding.

As Wells has started his work, he’s found floorboards used as clapboards and clapboard used as floorboards. He figures that workers grabbed any old piece as it was rebuilt in Stag Harbour.

He plans to redo the roof but hopes to use as much of the original materials as he can, including the original windows and what is on the inside of the church. Wells will insulate it and give it a fresh coat of paint along the way.

Once it’s all said and done, he plans to use the church as a workshop for other projects he has on the go.

“I love old buildings, but you have to be pragmatic about it,” said Wells. “If you don’t give these new buildings purpose and life, then they just become slowly deteriorating shells, and that’s not the way to do it.”

A couple of bays away from St. Patrick’s in Fortune Bay, Ambrose Price has similar thoughts about historic buildings and their worth to the communities they call home.

Recently, his hometown of Fortune tore down what locals call the Bennett House, a structure that has stood in the middle of town for a century or more.

The Bennett House was a family home in Fortune that later served as the Saint Pierre-et-Miquelon ferry office for decades before it was abandoned again.

For Price, a designer and former HGTV host, seeing the historic building come down was heartbreaking.

He also wondered if there was an alternative to tearing it down, perhaps by moving it, for instance.

“It’s one thing when you’re tearing down something that’s inside the town, but when you are basically reshaping or taking something out of the main downtown core, which stood there for a century, it’s going to make a huge difference,” said Price.

While Price understands that people who owned the building have full control, seeing the destruction of the home felt like a waste of a building that had once played an important role in the region.

It’s also sparked something inside of him to help preserve as many historical buildings as he can.

“Now that I’ve got a glimpse of what’s going on, I want to do whatever I can in my power, with my experience, to help save as many heritage structures around the island as possible,” said Price.

To that end, he’s been meeting with Heritage NL, the entity which documents the province’s heritage structures, in hopes of figuring out a plan to help municipalities protect their history.

Some municipalities in the province already have heritage regulations, but Price would like to see those buildings repurposed should they need to be.

“How do we support municipalities to ensure that we keep these historic pieces in the communities where they were built to last?” he said. “They were built to last, and they were built to be a familiar face in the hearts of communities around Newfoundland.”

For Wells, that work is using his newly restored church as a workshop when he’s finished.

He also has something else planned for St. Patrick’s.

The church’s old bell still sits outside, and while its chimes haven’t filled the air in some time, Wells dreams of ringing in the New Year with it.

When he does, it’ll be another reminder of the importance of preserving history.

“That’s important. It makes it the fabric of society,” said Wells. “It’s the fabric of the culture that we have.”