Description of Historic Place

St. Vincent de Paul is a small, Gothic Revival, wood-shingled Roman Catholic church located on a rise of land overlooking the harbour at Queensport, Nova Scotia. The municipal heritage designation covers the building and surrounding land.

Heritage Value

St. Vincent de Paul church was built in 1897 when Queensport was still known as Crow Harbour. For the previous half a century the largely Irish congregation had been meeting in private homes. St. Vincent de Paul Church is therefore valued for its historic importance to the Irish Catholic community, its Gothic Revival architecture and the granite foundation stones. The stones themselves came from the Queensport quarry, once an important local industry.

The building includes a nave, a chancel on its eastern end, a vestry and steeple with a bell. Due to its height added to the height of the land the church sits on, the steeple served as a navigational aid to local fishermen for many years. The symmetrically arranged Gothic windows have simple tracery, echoed in the centrally placed entrance covered with a Gothic arch window.

Source - Municipality of the District of Guysborough Heritage Registration document, number 567.

Character-Defining Elements

The character-defining elements of this building relate to its Gothic Revival style, including:

- its wood-frame construction with wood shingle cladding;
- the shingle-clad steeple above a central, square frontispiece;
- the cross insignia cut into the right front granite foundation cornerstone;
- the locally quarried and dressed granite foundation;
- the Gothic Revival, symmetrically-placed windows with decorative tracery;
- the steeply pitched roof.