The cemeteries of Newfoundland

On the way to Gander, to attend a wood pellet conference (!), I talked with W. about his hometown, Gambo. Gambo, a Catholic town, is adjacent to Dark Cove, a Protestant town. They're "only separated by a sign," but each has its own schools, effectively creating a segregated community based on religion.

We passed a cemetery in a tiny town. There were three signs delineating the graves: Catholic, Anglican, Pentecostal. Apparently the Pentecostals came in the 1970s, and "converted half the middle of Newfoundland." Now the schools have a relic of this past, with separate schools for each little community.

The churches are lovely, little, white structures, almost identical except for the signs out front. The cemeteries are sometimes adjacent, but sometimes orphaned, outside of town or hidden away in the woods. Now I need to find the cemeteries of the resettled communities that line the island.

The road to Gander does not connect communities but draws a seemingly arbitrary line meandering around the island, with spurs off the road going to communities clustered around coves and nearby islands. The road (Highway 1) does go through Grand Falls, which had its pulp and paper mill close two years ago, and it goes through Stephenville, which had a mill closure several years prior to that. It also goes through Corner Brook, with the only remaining pulp and paper mill on the island. It connects the forestry communities.

Random notes on the 3 pulp and paper mill towns of NL:
Grand Falls: The town of Grand Falls built its mill in 1908. Well, Abitibi built the mill. Grand Falls was the town built around the mill, and we drove through it today to look at the empty mill. The town was built for managers and it has neat houses. The neighboring town of Windsor apparently housed the workers and is more ramshackle and poor. When the mill at Grand Falls was built, it was situated next to the hydro power plant; the processed pulp and paper was then trucked (or moved by railroad, initially) to the port at the coast, 20 miles away.

Corner Brook: One of the older forestry communities, the mill was built by Bowater in the 1920s after the technology of power lines had become available (common?) and so the mill was not located next to the power plant but next to the port. The power plant is at Deer Lake, a ways away.

Stephenville: An old U.S. military community with streets named after states. Labrador Linerboard built a mill there in the 1970s, with a business model as follows: import wood from Labrador (the mainland) and mill it on Newfoundland. Apparently, it was a bad business model and the mill closed after only a few years. It was then bought by Abitibi-Bowater (then just Abitibi, I think), which converted the mill to pulp and paper and operated it until recently.

I asked W. about employment in Stephenville and Grand Falls-Windsor since the mill closures and he said the towns were doing okay. I was surprised, and he said "well, the men all commute to Alberta." That's right, they commute to Alberta. Fort McMurray is a town of Newfoundlanders in the northern reaches of Alberta; the workers have moved from obsolete, isolated resource communities to a resource community of the modern era. I doubt for long. W. said that the services of the town - the hospitals, the schools, even the Tim Hortons - were having trouble keeping up with the growth. A classic boom town.

Good thing we've learned so much. What but good could come from a boom town?