How a renovation revealed the St. John's of 96 years ago

I expected a few surprises when my partner and I started renovating our kitchen. A house built near downtown St. John's before the 1900s is sure to be, shall we say, unpredictable.

First, the lumpy donnacona wallboard came down, and then layer after layer of wallpaper. 

There on the raw, dark boards was pasted the old newsprint, editions of The Evening Telegram dating back to the months after the First World War.

The pages are yellow and brittle, and crumble at the slightest movement.

They reveal a St. John's in the spring of 1919, still reeling from horror of war, but looking forward to the promise of spring.

The seal hunt was about to begin -- the disaster of 1914 not forgotten -- and people were looking to have some fun.

The Daily Mail in 1913  had offered a prize of 10,000 pounds for the person to cross the Atlantic Ocean in less than 72 hours. The contest, suspended during the war, was on again and put the St. John's area on the map as the takeoff point for several attempts.

The ads, of course, are perfect in their antiquity, but the newspapers themselves must not have been the best insulators.

Along with the 1919 papers was a later edition, from 1925 at the earliest, indicating perhaps that more than newspaper was needed to keep my old kitchen warm.