Description of Historic Place

Heyfield Memorial United Church and Cemetery Municipal Heritage Site is located off the water side of Route 80, the main road in Heart's Content, NL. The site includes a small, white Gothic Revival style church with a steeple, and a cemetery directly on its grounds. The municipal heritage designation includes the combined footprint of the building and the churchyard cemetery.

Heritage Value

The Heyfield Memorial United Church and Churchyard Cemetery Site has been designated because it has historic, cultural and aesthetic values.

The Heyfield Memorial United Church and Cemetery Site has historic value because of its connection to the Anglo-American Telegraph Company in Heart’s Content and Samuel Seymour Stentaford, a young man from Brigus. He was a telegrapher with the company, which had earned Heart’s Content a place in communications history by laying at its shores the first successful submarine transatlantic cable in the New World in 1857. Stentaford, with other company employees and Methodist residents of neighouring communities, worked together to form a Methodist congregation in Heart's Content.

The Heyfield Memorial United Church and Cemetery Site is also historically significant for its association with Reverend Jesse Heyfield. In 1877 the Methodist mission at Heart’s Content got its first clergyman, Reverend Joseph Lister, during whose one year term the church building was planned. Construction was completed the following year during the ministry of Reverend Heyfield. The church was dedicated on November 12, 1878 by Heyfield and he served at Heart’s Content until 1879, and again from 1908 until his death in December 1910. In 1975, upon the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the United Church of Canada, the Heart’s Content congregation named their church Heyfield Memorial in his memory.

The Heyfield Memorial United Church has aesthetic value as revealed by its Gothic Revival style of architecture. Such features include the steeply-pitched roof, tower and steeple, and pointed-arch windows with textured and mauve-coloured stained glass. The interior elements exemplify the use of texture and space with vaulted ceilings and exposed arched roof bracing. The walls and ceiling are sheathed in pressed tin, all painted white.

The Heyfield Memorial United Church Cemetery has historic value because of its age and location. It is located in the grassy churchyard and contains approximately fifty gravemarkers constructed in column or tablet forms and made of white and grey marble. They date from the late 1870s through the mid-1930s. Markers commemorating Reverend Jesse Heyfield and S.S. Stentaford are amongst them. Other surnames include Ainley, Bonner, Gardner, Haddon, Hopkins, Howell, Janes, Lever, Matthews, Oates, Ollerhead, Pugh, Rabbitts, Robbins, Rowe and Thompson.

The Heyfield Memorial United Church and Cemetery site has aesthetic value because of its visibility and prominent oceanside location along the main road through Heart’s Content. The church and cemetery, taken together, evoke the turn of the twentieth century period and are important landmarks in the town’s landscape.

Source: Town of Heart’s Content Town Council Meeting Minutes of 2007/04/04

Character-Defining Elements

All those elements, exterior and interior, which reflect the age, décor, and Gothic Revival architecture of the church building, including:
- steeply pitched roof;
- tower with spire;
- original dimensions and height;
- materials, size, style, and placement of original windows and doors;
- pointed arch windows with textured and mauve-coloured stained glass;
- and decorative tin applied to ceilings and walls

And relating to the historic value of the cemetery:

- type, materials and placement of all gravemarkers

And elements which contribute to the overall aesthetic and landscape value of the site:

-location of the church and cemetery in relation to each other;
-natural topography of the cemetery;
-and the location of the site in the community.