Come back from away: Rare photos reveal mystery, history and intrigue

Two young boys show off their catch. This image is part of a series of rare photographs of rural Newfoundland from more than a hundred years ago. Public domain

Along the northern coast of Newfoundand’s Conception Bay, there’s a string of rural towns with landscapes that take you on a journey to the past.

There are cemeteries with headstones dating back to the 18th century, though it can be hard to make out the birth and death dates on some of the crumbling concrete slabs.

Weathered slipways can be found on the ocean’s edge, but despite centuries of heavy rain and strong currents, the rugged coastline remains largely unchanged.

In these towns, roots run deep. Now, the past has unexpectedly come back to life: a series of rare photographs have been discovered depicting candid scenes of how people lived in these communities over a hundred years ago.

Some of the pictures have writing on the back. There are phrases, like “Western Bay,” that indicate the names of a specific location, or names, which reveal a little more information about the people depicted on the fading prints. 

But clues about most are few and far between. 

Who are these people? Where are they standing? What’s there now?

Over the last few months, I’ve had the pleasure of digging into a bit of a mystery. While working on daily news assignments, I found my focus drifting back to the mysterious photographs, wondering about what stories they might reveal. 

Video producer Mark Cumby and I set out to solve this mystery. Along the way, we met some wonderful characters, made some fascinating discoveries and learned about the threads of history that together weave a local tapestry. 

It’s important to know that a mystery all about outport Newfoundland began in an unlikely place: a small antique shop in rural Ontario.

‘It’s time travel’

David Howes is an avid collector who lives in the small town of Stayner, Ont., located in the Clearview township just south of Collingwood.

This winter, he sent an email to me at CBC in St. John’s, telling me about a series of around 30 stereoscope cards of rural Newfoundland that he believes are originals.

I was captivated by his email, so I gave him a call. He told me that he found the photographs in the Wise Owl antique shop in the nearby town of Elmvale. Howes collects stereoscope cards, and was searching for ones of Canada, which he says are rare.

This time, he hit the jackpot.

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Stereoscope cards consist of two nearly identical photographs placed side-by-side. The card is then placed into a machine called a stereoscope. The technology was popular in the Victorian era. When you look through the lenses of the device, your eyes will adjust and fuse the two images into one 3D picture. 

Think of it as an old-fashioned View-Master, explains Howes, referring to the toy that had peak popularity in the 1960s, and is still made today. 

“It creates this interesting kind of connection between the viewer and the person in the photograph,” he says. “It makes them come alive, you know? So, it’s like you’ve entered into their space again.

“It’s time travel.”

Howes told me the shop’s owner couldn’t recall how pictures of Newfoundland ended up in his store.

Stereoscope cards were originally created for medical purposes, but became popularized in the mid-19th century. Often, photographers would capture famous landmarks such as the Grand Canyon or the Eiffel Tower.

Cards typically have stamps indicating they’ve been mass produced, says Howes. The photos of Newfoundland, however, are different. They were individually glued onto sheets of cardboard, with no indication of who took the photographs — so, he believes they are original prints.

It was “very, very rare” to have access to a stereoscope at the time Howes predicts the photographs were taken, around the beginning of the 20th century. He says the photographer was certainly a “cutting-edge person,” someone with access to expensive equipment and who was at the forefront of a budding field.

“Someone went to Western Bay and thought, ‘This is something that the world needs to see,’” he says.

WATCH | Tag along on a journey to solve a photographic mystery that takes you deep into the past:

In the stack of cards, there are photos of men standing on rugged rocks catching capelin with weighted cast nets, and boys showing off massive fish to the camera. Although some of the boys look like they could not have been much older than 12, their mature faces and clothing ages them well beyond their years.

All of the people photographed, save a small few, stare directly into the camera.

“You can tell by the way that they lovingly, you know, look at the subjects and capture them, that this was a fascinating, first-time experience for them,” says Howes.

Churches feature prominently in a few of the photographs. In one, around 100 children wearing bonnets and suits — their Sunday best — sit in rows of church pews, staring straight-faced into the camera. In another, a man stands on a field covered in rocks, in front of a church that’s just being constructed.

There are other scenes in the cache. Large ships sailing in what’s likely the frigid North Atlantic, people dressed in long coats and fancy hats riding in horse-drawn carriages, and goats standing on a rocky cliff.

One photo shows two women standing on a large, grassy lawn in front of a biscuit box house. On the back of the card is a message in pen that reads, “Nathaniel and Emily Follett home, Newfoundland.”

There’s another photo of two men wearing black caps standing in front of a fence that borders the same biscuit box house, with a woman standing in the doorway. On the back of that photograph are the words, “Nathaniel and Emily Follett’s house. Possibly Nathaniel and Minister.”

For Howes, photos like these are startling. He could only imagine, though, what a direct descendant might think. 

“I think they really belong to the family, and I would like the family to be able to reconnect with their relatives in some way,” says Howes.

“That would be amazing, to see a 3D picture of your grandmother.”

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Howes and I spoke on the phone a few times, and I was intrigued with what he found. I wanted to help connect the photos with the people and places in them.

Howes shipped the cards, along with a stereoscope, to the CBC newsroom in St. John’s.

Clues written in pen on the back of the photographs indicate most of them were likely taken in small communities within what is now referred to as Conception Bay North, places such as Western Bay, Tackers Cove and Small Point-Adam’s Cove-Blackhead-Broad Cove. 

The communities are all essentially within a stone’s throw of each other. When Mark Cumby and I drove out to explore, we were introduced to Dave King.

If you drive through Broad Cove, you cannot miss King’s place. There’s a large skull and crossbones flag waving at the front of his house, and just behind the flagpole is a garage that isn’t used to house cars — it’s the local hang.

The fridge is always stocked with beer, there are  bags of chips and candy on the table, and nearly every inch of the place is covered with family pictures, skeleton figurines and pirate decorations.

Everybody in the area knows King, but not only for the fact that he loves pirates, or because he throws great parties. His family has lived in the community for centuries, and were some of the first people to settle there.

“This is where we all came from,” says King, sitting in his garage in what he likes to call “downtown Broad Cove.”

“This is where it all started.”

As King flips through the stereoscope cards, he tells me he’s always researching and asking older folks in the community about the past.

He didn’t have to look long at the photographs to know where — exactly where, in fact — some of them were taken.

King gave us helmets and took us for a bumpy ride on his side-by-side, eager to show us his favourite spots in the community. 

One of the first places he shows us is a church with white vinyl siding. This is the Broad Cove church, he tells us, and a plaque on the side of the church says it dates back to 1938.

King holds a stereoscope card of a man standing on a grassy field that’s covered in large rocks, in front of a church that’s being built. King tells us that photo is of the original Broad Cove church, which burned down the year before, in 1937.

The church we’re standing in front of was rebuilt on the very spot as the one in the photograph, says King. He estimates the picture was taken around 1904 to 1908.

Today, the Broad Cove church is up for sale. The land surrounding it is overgrown with weeds and bushes. 

King then takes us to the top of a hill in Broad Cove that offers a 360-degree panorama of the area. This is the exact view captured in his favourite stereoscope photo in the stack — a wide shot of the community’s hilly terrain, with dozens of houses and other structures scattered near the water’s edge and along a winding road.

As we look out at the scenery, you can tell the landscape hasn’t changed drastically, but there are fewer homes and other structures dotting the landscape by the bay. 

King tells me there aren’t as many young families living in the area as there were years ago, including when the photograph was taken, and a lot of older folks who have lived here all their lives are gradually passing away.

It also wasn’t uncommon for families to move to the mainland for new opportunities, he says, places such as Ontario or Boston.

We also visit a beach in the neighbouring community of Blackhead. The photographs of men casting nets from rugged rocks were likely taken on these shores, says King.

Standing on the small and rocky beach, King tells me he’s never seen stereoscope photographs of Newfoundland before, and that these are some of the oldest pictures he’s ever seen of the community.

He says the Newfoundlanders who were captured in the images likely had never seen a camera before the stereoscope photographer came to town. Most people living in small, outport communities could not afford photographs, he says, let alone a camera to take them with.

King also takes us down the road from his house to meet his friends, Doug Hudson and Frank Crummey, who live nearby. 

The two are childhood friends, and they tell us that generations of their families have lived in the area. As they look through the stereoscope photographs together, they point out specific beaches and the areas where some of their friends likely lived.

Right away, the pictures bring them back to childhood. Hudson mimics how, as a young boy, he used to catch capelin with a cast net, showing us how he held the lead weights in his mouth just like one of the boys photographed.

“This is unreal, eh?” says Crummey, holding the stereoscope photographs in his lap. The photos were taken long before he was born, and yet remind him of what it was like to grow up in an outport. 

“It was the most enjoyable time of your life. You were so carefree and you never had a worry in the world.”

Carolyn Marshall, who lives in Broad Cove, spent a lot of summers in the area with friends like Hudson and Crummey. 

Her maiden name is LeGrow, and like King, she says her family was one of the first to settle in the area back in the early 1700s.

Marshall reminisces on her childhood as she delicately flips through the photographs. When she sees an image of an older man with a pile of capelin in front of him, she giggles — both at the man’s smile, and the specific scent the photo brings to mind.

She tells me the small and plentiful fish was often used as fertilizer.

“The smell was hideous,” she says, “but I mean, they had to use what they had.”

King, Crummey, Hudson and Marshall all told me the same thing: how hard-working the people photographed must have been — whether fishing for capelin or building churches, that industrious spirit is palpable in most of the stereoscope images.

Although King’s friends have fond memories of the place they spent childhood and are now retiring in, they couldn’t identify anybody in the pictures.

But, we have a clue: Nathaniel and Emily Follett. Most people in the community know each other, so it didn’t take long for King to drive us down the road to Western Bay and introduce us to his friend, Bren Follett.

We followed behind King in our car and came to a long driveway with tall trees lining either side. At the front of the driveway is a large rock, with the words “The Folletts” hand-painted on it.

We bring the stack of photos to Bren Follett’s shed, and lie them on a plastic folding table. Bren tells us his family was also “probably some of the first settlers” to arrive in Western Bay.

“This is home,” he says. “You smell the beach, that’s the smell of money that is… Some of these fellas say ‘oh that’s stink,’ but that’s not a stink, that’s perfume to us.”

He recognizes many of the places photographed, but when I show him the photo of Nathaniel and Emily Follett’s house, he shakes his head. He’s not familiar, he says, with the house, nor with the names of people I had hoped he would recognize. 

“Nobody kept the history,” he says.

“We got a lot of older generation gone that we could’ve asked questions [to], but they’re gone and we can’t ask nobody,” says King, standing beside his friend.

“So we got to research stuff and people got to come up with pictures like that and get our interest going again.”

We couldn’t give up there. Back at my desk in the CBC newsroom in St. John’s, some online sleuthing took me to a barebones webpage detailing some information about the couple, including their birth and death dates.

At the bottom of the webpage is a phone number for a woman named Peggy Haliburton, who is listed as a “source.” I called, and it went to voicemail. But just as I was leaving a message on her answering machine, asking if she might know anything about the people in these mysterious photographs, she picked up.

That’s when I learned she is Nathaniel and Emily Follett’s great-granddaughter. 

Coming home

Peggy Haliburton lives on a farm in Milton, Ont., around 140 kilometres from Elmvale, where the stereoscope photographs were found. Her home, it turns out, is far closer to where our journey began than Western Bay, which is about 3,000 kilometres away.

In Haliburton’s living room, she has boxes overflowing with photographs, cassette tapes and various documents detailing her family’s genealogy. She has massive white binders with things such as “Western Bay” and “our family” written on the covers.

This is the accumulation of decades spent researching her Newfoundland ancestors, the Folletts.

These are people who made me who I am.

Haliburton, who was born and raised in Ontario, says she always loved history, and she remembers her father telling her stories about the family’s Newfoundland roots. During one of their conversations, she says, “all of a sudden this lightbulb went off — I’ve got to write this down.”

Around 30 years ago, she began researching the Folletts, contacting people from around the world who share the same last name as her ancestors. With the help of distant and close relatives, she says she’s created a Follett family tree. It now has more than 1,000 names.

Her great-grandfather Nathaniel was the fourth generation of Folletts from Western Bay, she says. His wife, Emily, was part of the Whalen family from Bradley’s Cove.

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Nathaniel owned a schooner and would travel to hunt seals in the Labrador fishing village of Red Bay, says Haliburton. She says Emily had the only cow in Western Bay at the time, and likely provided parents in the community with milk for their children.

The couple had nine children, she says, who all eventually moved to the mainland and pursued successful careers. One of their children, Rev. Charles Follett, was a well-known minister in Toronto. Haliburton says he brought Nathaniel and Emily over to Ontario in their senior years in 1913 to receive better health care. They died on the mainland in 1917 and 1931, respectively.

Haliburton sent me a document she wrote with more details about Nathaniel, details her father provided her before he died. The document says Nathaniel’s gravestone reads, “Died anchored in the harbour.” It also says he was nicknamed “Natty” and was a hard-working man with a quick temper. 

Haliburton says that, when asked by his son if he liked living in Toronto, Nathaniel replied, “My boy, I’ve come here to die.”

There are still Folletts, like Bren Follett, who are members of the same family tree, but part of a branch that decided to stay in Western Bay, says Haliburton. When Nathaniel and Emily left Newfoundland, she says that part of the family’s connection to the island was mostly severed.

“They came up and they immediately tried to lose their accents, where they were from,” she says. “So two to three generations later, they knew nothing about their ancestry.”

Haliburton’s research propelled her to reconnect the Folletts with their Newfoundland ancestry, and with each other. In 1993, she co-ordinated and hosted a family reunion on a farm in Milton. Around 500 Folletts were in attendance.

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Haliburton says she was shocked when I called and told her about the old photographs of her grandparents.

“I’m going, ‘Wow, nobody had cameras’ [then]. This would’ve been taken just around the turn of the century,” she said.

“Newfoundland was not part of Canada. It had more of a connection with England. People came out of England to take those photographs of the so-called Commonwealth.”

Haliburton can point out Nathaniel and Emily in a few of the stereoscope images, and she says she may know the names of some of the other individuals photographed. She says the photograph of the two women standing in front of the biscuit box house is of Emily and Emily’s mother, Sarah Ann Whalen. 

Haliburton knows enough about the Folletts to write a thick book about them. She also knows a lot about Newfoundland history, and says she’s instilling that knowledge into her descendents. She’s already taken her three grandchildren to the province, and is eager to come back for a visit.

“My first trip to Newfoundland, 20 years ago, I felt like I was going home,” she says. “These are people who made me who I am.”

We solved some of the mystery, but questions remain. Each picture likely has many stories behind it, so chances are, we have only begun to scratch the surface. There are many faces in the old images we can’t put a name to, and we still don’t know who captured the photographs.

Whoever the photographer was, they likely wouldn’t have imagined their photos would become time machines — ways for people to reconnect with those who paved the way for their future. 

“The early, early days in Newfoundland were very harsh. A lot of people didn’t survive the way they do today, and that grit is in me, and I understand more about who I am because of my Newfoundland ancestry,” says Haliburton.

“These are people who made me who I am. They were very moral people, honourable people, intelligent people.”

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