Heritage home restoration project uncovers a piece of lost St. John's history
140-year-old Pleasant Street house a time capsule of a different era
A 2½-storey Second Empire-style house towers over Pleasant Street in the west end of St. John's. The fully detached structure is set back from the road with broad bay windows drawing the south-facing sunlight into each floor.
From its vantage point, this house has witnessed 142 years of St. John's evolution. Built in 1882, this house survived the Great Fire and several others. It watched as the city's first and last electric streetcar came and went. It looked on as iron steamers replaced wooden-hulled sailing ships in the harbour.
Tyler Stapleton, 31, has a timeless quality to him. A soft-spoken man from just outside St. John's, his passion for heritage and urban planning seems fitting. A ship navigation officer by trade, he has volunteered for the Newfoundland and Labrador Historic Trust since 2015. That was also the year he met his match, and bought it: the Simms House.
"It was all covered in vinyl siding and a lot of the details were stripped off, but I kind of see what could be," said Stapleton, who has been working at this restoration project for the last nine years.
Nothing makes a local historian like embarking on a heritage restoration project. Stapleton has spent immeasurable time over the years poring over old city maps, photo archives, and 100-year-old newspaper clippings in order to replicate the structure's 19th-century characteristics the best he can.
Until now, his focus had been on the structure itself: ripping up floorboards, rebuilding its stone foundation, painting the siding a lavish dark red. It was not until recently that he decided to solve another mystery.
"Doing some research and looking at old maps and insurance atlases and things, I learned that there was a cooperage, a two-storey cooperage here," Stapleton said.
A cooperage is a workshop where wooden barrels are made. Used for the storage and transportation of one of the province's main exports, saltfish, the coopering industry was central to the livelihoods of many Newfoundlanders until well into the mid-1900s.
The Simms cooperage would have represented a mid-sized operation in St. John's industrial west end.
"There's still some mysteries here to figure out," he said, for there was nothing but grass in his empty backyard when he moved in.
"Was the building taken apart and dismantled or did it just rot and collapse?"
To uncover this hidden story, Stapleton needed help.
Tracing family lines in the sand
He decided to find out what he could about the home's most notable owner, Henry V. Simms.
Henry V. Simms bought the Pleasant Street home in 1902. He was a cooper — or barrel-maker — by trade and a vocal member of the Prohibition Canvassing Committee in St. John's. Generations of the family lived under this mansard roof thereafter.
One day Stapleton posted a picture of Henry V. Simms's gravesite that he managed to track down in the Belvedere Roman Catholic Cemetery.
And who he met next couldn't have been a better fit.
"My great-grandfather grew up here, and then my grandfather grew up across the street," said Elsa Simms. "Then I even lived across the street for a little bit with my dad when I was very little."
Simms reached out to Stapleton when she saw his photo online. Not only can she trace her direct connection to this house, she also happens to be a community archeologist.
Simms co-founded Era Nova Archaeological Services with fellow PhD students Zoë Helleiner and Pier-Ann Milliard in May. Based in St. John's, the new cultural resource management is well situated in a province that so highly prizes its heritage.
Embarking on the mystery of Stapleton's backyard cooperage is their first project on the books.
"This is the closest community archaeology can get — to your family archaeology," Simms said.
The project has sentimental meaning to many Simms family members, some of whom have come to help dig on site while others look out for Simms's updates in the family heritage group on social media.
Every so often, Simms kept finding artifacts that remind her of her family. "We found it really cool belt buckle — my pop has a belt buckle collection," she explained.
Even a salvaged leg of a stove has meaning to her grandfather, who said he knew where the stove was in the structure. "That's just a tangible connection to my family who used and wore those objects," said Simms.
For the last six weeks, the sounds of metal shovels plunging into dirt and picking at rock have emerged from behind the Simms House. A six-foot hole in the backyard's grassy slope exposes the side walls and foundation of a collapsed cooperage.
Era Nova's goal is to excavate as much as they can of the old workshop, collecting anything they find in the soil that could expose layers of this lost piece of St. John's history.
"We think that this building collapsed in the late '60s," says Zoë Helleiner. "But the building itself was probably built in 1899 as stables and then was used as a cooperage from 1902 onwards."
If the cooperage collapsed in the 1960s, this means that Henry V. Simms and his son made barrels out of this backyard past the height of the industry in St. John's. "So they were keeping the trade alive," Helleiner said.
Besides belt buckles and stove legs, they've found a lot of dirty loot. "Exposing trash is part of what archaeologists do, just depends how old the trash is," Helleiner said. They will only know so much until the salvaged artifacts are sent to The Rooms for further study. But anything, including broken glass, old socks and plastic doll arms to ceramic pipes from the 1960s, is valuable to uncovering stories hidden beneath the ground.
"A really funny thing is that my great-great-great-grandfather was a prohibitionist, but we are finding an awful lot of alcohol bottles," Simms laughs.
And in this particular case, one man's trash is certainly another man's treasure.
Looking back at what lies ahead
The team is lucky to have connected with Stapleton. "Clients like Tyler, it's not mandatory for them to consult us if they want to do any sort of work that would involve archaeologists," said Pier-Ann Millard.
Except for some areas of the province like the southern coast of Labrador, the need for archaeologists on the scene during projects like these is determined case by case.
As for the exposed cooperage foundation, Stapleton has plans to rebuild a workshop modelled after the one that sheltered Henry V. Simms and his son as they painstakingly worked from dawn until dusk for years.
"A lot of people can see heritage as a negative point," Stapleton said. "But development and heritage can co-exist perfectly fine, and it can also really help."
Building a two-storey backyard dwelling is not permitted under the city's height regulations for new developments, but restoration plans for registered heritage structures are excluded from the rule.
And with the city's new Housing Accelerator Fund, which supports homeowners building additional housing units on their own property, Stapleton sees evergreen opportunities for this project.
"Down the road when I'm finished with the workshop, when someone else wants to be a caretaker of this house … maybe someone could live in this building," he says.
When Stapleton brings heritage and urban planning together, he feels he's accomplished a goal.
"That's the adaptive reuse of heritage that's really, really interesting," he said.
"You always have to look ahead."
Download our free CBC News app to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador. Click here to visit our landing page.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
