Description of Historic Place

St. Peter’s Anglican Church and Cemetery includes a Gothic Revival style church built in the first decade of the 1900s and surrounding cemetery. The property is located at 1219 Conception Bay Highway, Upper Gullies, Conception Bay South, NL. The designation includes the building and surrounding cemetery land.

Heritage Value

St. Peter’s Anglican Church and Cemetery has been designated a municipal heritage site by the Town of Conception Bay South due to its aesthetic, historic and spiritual values.

St. Peter’s Anglican Church has aesthetic value as it is a good example of a Gothic Revival church constructed locally using local materials. The steeply pitched gable roof adds dimension to this formal, pristine building. Single hung, arched, stained-glass, double windows are simply decorated with muntins in Gothic style. The regular coursed windows are repeated in the clerestory windows, which are set off by wide, plain, flat mouldings. The main entrance is located in a peaked roof porch on the front facade, where huge, elaborate, wrought iron hinges support two arched wooden doors. The Church’s tower reaches skyward with a simple belfry and a conical spire.

St. Peter’s Anglican Church has historic value as it is a physical testament to a way of life once common in small communities throughout Newfoundland and Labrador. When St. Peter’s Anglican congregation needed a new church it was constructed with funds raised by the community and was built by local craftsmen. Men gave freely of their labour to build the new church, fitting the work into their seasonal rhythms of employment. Wood for the building was harvested on Salmonier Line and hauled by horse to the site in the winter by pulling logs over the ice on the bay between Holyrood and Lance Cove. The women of the community formed sewing circles to raise money for the new church. The sewing circles had a tremendous response and classes from Hopewell, Seal Cove and Indian Pond joined to help raise funds. Through this, the women contributed many important features of the church including doors, stained glass windows and the church bell.

St. Peter’s Anglican Church has spiritual value because it represents the community’s desire and determination to have a building where they could practice their faith.

The churchyard cemetery also has aesthetic and historic value. The cemetery is a distinctive cultural landscape feature along Conception Bay Highway and its grassy grounds include walkways and mature trees and shrubs. The older gravemarkers are mainly tablet forms in white marble and are generally arranged in neat rows. The headstones also contain historic and genealogical type information, and may be considered artifacts on the landscape.

Source: Town of Conception Bay South Regular Council Meeting Motion #02-399 August 6, 2002.

Character-Defining Elements

All those features that represent the Gothic Revival style of the building, including:
- height of structure (including tower with spire);
- steeply pitched gable roof;
- arched wooden windows size, style, trim and placement;
- stained glass windows;
- arched wooden doors with wrought iron hinges;
- clerestory;
- size, style, trim and placement of porch on front façade, and;
- location, orientation, and dimensions of building.

Those elements which contribute to the cemetery’s aesthetic and historic value including:
- original memorial stones and monuments with their surviving inscriptions;
- style, placement and materials of gravemarkers;
- grassy groundcover;
- mature trees and shrubs;
- location of cemetery, and;
- its association with the Anglican religion.