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There once was a house in Deep Gulch that simply would not stay put. It had a little help moving about from its owner James Walsh.
James first moved his home after receiving complaints from the Roman Catholic priest and parishioners that he had been sending his children to the Anglican school (which he had done because it was closer to his home in Deep Gulch).¹ He moved his house onto the property of the Roman Catholic school in Burnt Head and likely hoped that would be the end of the complaints. But a little while later, his wife had a spat with a neighbour — and it was serious enough to cause James to move the Walsh house back to Deep Gulch.
There it remained — until he moved it to Cupids, where it stayed briefly. Then it came back to Deep Gulch ... then, finally, it was shifted into Cupids again, where it remains today.
Photo courtesy of Ross Boone via the Cupids Historical Society, Cupids Legacy Centre.
As strange as all this may seem today, it is not uncommon in Newfoundland and Labrador to hear stories of people taking their house with them when leaving their communities. The most well-known examples of this practice are related to the government's Resettlement Program of the 1950s. The communities along the Burnt Head and Spectacle Head trails were abandoned without government intervention throughout the 1930s and 1940s, however, as people living there chose to search for their fortunes elsewhere.
It can be difficult to leave behind your house and all the good memories of the community you were born and raised in. Some who knew their destination (and perhaps had economic reasons for doing so), felt it was better to move the entire house instead of rebuilding from scratch — especially if they were not moving far.
Many of the people who lived in the now abandoned communities along the Burnt Head and Spectacle Head trails moved into nearby Cupids. Some of their houses can still be seen today. For example, a house once owned by the Taylor family was moved out of Deep Gulch and is now located in modern Burnt Head, near the Anglican cemetery. Another was moved next to the Windsors family property, at the bottom of the hill near Shark Cove Road. A house once owned by Patrick Walsh Jr. and Mary (Power) Walsh was relocated to Cupids, but it is no longer standing.
Photo courtesy of Madonna Chaulk.
Moving a house was no easy task, but it could be done in several ways. Those who wanted to reconstruct a house exactly as it looked in its original location would use a method called corners. They cut the structure at each corner, turning the walls into four sheets. Then they cut the sheets in half, into the upstairs and downstairs portions.² Six to eight men loaded these sheets onto horse-drawn carts and carried them to their new location. The pieces were then reassembled on new foundations. Because of the effort involved with this method, most people reassembled their homes in nearby communities—but at least one house, belonging to a Mr. Charles Dawe, made it all the way into St. John's and was reassembled on Blackmarsh Road.³
Sometimes houses were moved over water. The pieces of Mr. William Hussey's house were carefully lowered over the cliff in Deep Gulch and onto a ship, then sailed across the bay to Port de Grave.⁴
It was often simply easier to dismantle a house and use the materials to construct a new one elsewhere. Pieces of the houses, sheds, and root cellars that once made up the communities along the Burnt Head and Spectacle Head trails were repurposed into new houses in several locations.
² Cecil Morgan, interview with Kelly Butler, August 20, 1997, Cupids Historical Society Collection, Cupids Legacy Centre.
³ William Norman, interview with Kelly Butler, July 31, 1997, Cupids Historical Society Collection, Cupids Legacy Centre.