Description of Historic Place
Victoria Hall, historically the headquarters for St. Peter’s Lodge of the Society of United Fishermen (SUF) #12, is a single storey, wooden building with a mid pitch roof and round arch windows. It is located at 149 Main Street, Twillingate, NL. The designation is confined to the footprint of the building.
Heritage Value
Victoria Hall has been designated a municipal heritage site by the Town of Twillingate due to its historic and aesthetic value.
Victoria Hall has historic value due to its extended use as a commercial building and meeting place for community based organizations in Twillingate. The building was originally a storehouse during the era when Twillingate was the major mercantile centre for the western area of Notre Dame Bay. It was used by the merchant firm of Messrs. Waterman & Co., which was established in the 1860s, a successor of the area’s prominent Slade and Cox firms. Messrs. Waterman & Co. had a number of premises in the Twillingate-Fogo area in the latter part of the nineteenth century and outfitted schooners for the Labrador fishery.
In 1868-69 the local North Star Division #15, the Twillingate branch of the Sons of Temperance, a fraternal organization promoting abstinence from alcohol, purchased the property from Messrs. Waterman & Co. for 45 pounds and renovated the building for their own purposes. It was named Victoria Hall in honour of the reigning English monarch of the time. By 1875 the local Society of United Fishermen (SUF), then a fairly new fraternal/occupational benevolent organization founded in the Trinity Bay area of Newfoundland, was also headquartered at the site. That same year, the building also began to serve as a lodge for the local Crosby Lodge of the Loyal Orange Association, a Protestant fraternal organization.
In 1909 the Orangemen moved across the street to Alexandra Hall, and The Sons of Temperance continued to use Victoria Hall as a Temperance Hall until 1917. Both organizations sold their shares to the SUF, which maintained ownership until 2003. Over the course of more than a century, the building in its roles as a Temperance Hall, Orange Lodge and SUF Lodge provided a venue for a range of meetings, lectures and celebrations, establishing a significant place in community life and memory.
Aesthetically, Victoria Hall is fairly typical of lodges of its provenance, with its single storey, rectangular form on wooden shores, mid pitch roof with the entrance in the gable end, fanlight and wheel window over the entrance, sizable arched windows with moulded trim in the front and along the sides, and narrow white painted clapboard exterior. Over the years, through its adaptation from a company storehouse to a community building, elements such as the deep scrolled eaves returns, open covered porch, and SUF sign have been added. The latter identifies the lodge and features the SUF initials and symbols, including the triangle representing Newfoundland's approximate shape, with Cape Bauld, Cape Race and Cape Ray being the points of the triangle. Within the triangle appears the Maltese Cross, with the junction of four spears forming eight points, symbolically representing the eight Beatitudes that members are taught to learn and observe. The motto adopted for the Society was Love, Purity, and Fidelity represented respectively by the colours red, white and blue.
Source: Town of Twillingate Regular Council Meeting Motion 07-205 November 5, 2007.
Character-Defining Elements
All those elements which represent the historic and aesthetic value of Victoria Hall, including:
- number of storeys;
- mid pitch roof;
- projecting eaves with scrolled eaves returns and moulded fascia;
- narrow white clapboard sheathing;
- corner boards;
- window size, style, trim and placement, including wheel window and fanlights;
- original size, style, trim and placement of exterior doors, including fanlight;
- style and location of porch;
- form, dimension, location and orientation of building, and;
- painted SUF sign on main facade.
