Heritage N.L. project honours legacies of Lebanese businesses in St. John's
N.L.'s Lebanese community a fiercely proud one, says Marina Owens
The Lebanese have deep roots in a number of Newfoundland and Labrador communities, and an effort is underway to ensure their legacies get the recognition many believe they deserve.
Marina Owens, whose ancestors were among the many who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, says the long-established Lebanese presence in the province is a source of pride that warrants preservation.
"I would hope to think [that effort] is a stimulus or a catalyst for recognizing what we did contribute as a community and that it and it'll be honoured in a substantial way by our city and the province," she said.
Owens has been researching her family roots in the province for years, piecing together a timeline from a patchwork of photos, oral histories, and archive materials. That research is part of a wider effort, spearheaded by Heritage N.L., to map the locations of Lebanese businesses in St. John's, and match them to their owners.
"I would hazard a guess that just about any person in the Newfoundland area that has a Lebanese heritage knows about it," Owens said. "We're a proud community."
"Sometimes we aren't as good at telling the diverse stories as we could be," said Dale Jarvis, executive director of Heritage N.L.
But that's just one of many reasons why the stories of the Lebanese in Newfoundland have largely gone untold.
For instance, Lebanese who arrived around the turn of the 20th century would have faced immense pressure to assimilate, Jarvis said. Many responded by swapping out Arabic surnames like Al Ghossain for English-sounding alternatives like Gosine.
Tracing those histories, and documenting them permanently, is the goal of Heritage N.L.'s mapping project.
"I think in the rush to become Newfoundlanders, sometimes that history was kind of left behind a little bit," he said. "There's now a generation of people who are looking back and realizing what has been lost."
A lasting contribution
Owens's own research was focused on tracing her great-grandmother's journey from Hadeth El-Joubbeh in what is now the Republic of Lebanon to downtown St. John's, where she set up a thriving boarding house.
From records she found in Memorial University's maritime archives, Owens was able to piece together that the business, which was located on the west end of Water Street, was a popular community hangout, and a haunt for visiting seamen.
"A lot of the Lebanese community would gather there, play cards, have some social events," Owens said. "A lot of talented musicians came from that community, so I can only picture what it would have been like to be a fly on the wall or just sit amidst all of that and have that bit of fun and sense of camaraderie."
Owens's family was far from the only Lebanese-owned business in town at the time. One of the most notable, Tooton's Photography, thrived well into the late 20th century.
Until the 1960s, New Gower Street was a hub for Lebanese-owned businesses, Owens said, and her family owned a number of shops in the area.
"Any person who lived in St. John's between the early 1900s and 1950s in the area of downtown St. John's would know that community and would have shopped in those businesses," she said.
Preserving the legacies of those businesses — many of which had to be abandoned or relocated when the city's urban renewal plan redeveloped the area around New Gower Street in the 1960s — is a priority for Heritage N.L.'s mapping project.
Owens is confident that project will honour her family's legacy, and that of countless other Lebanese immigrants who persevered in the face of a foreign language, culture and climate.
"They ran those businesses with the limited English they had and maintained their family homes and kept their families well cared for and educated," she said. "We have a lot to be thankful for."
With files from Weekend AM