Description of Historic Place

New Perlican is a coastal town on the south side of Trinity Bay, NL. Its Heritage Conservation Zone was established by the Town of New Perlican Municipal Plan and Development Regulations 2001-2011, wherein it is mapped. The zone encompasses an area along the shoreline of the community’s eastern cove, New Perlican Harbour, and includes the vicinity of Harbour Road, Hiscock’s Road, Legge’s Lane, Tory Road, Tory Road Extension and Indian Meal Road. It also extends across the main road (Route 80) to the Church Road vicinity. The zone includes mostly residential properties and also has fisheries buildings and structures along the waterfront, commercial buildings, and several prominent institutional buildings.

Heritage Value

The Town of New Perlican Heritage Conservation Zone has been established to protect the historic, cultural, environmental and aesthetic values of the community’s heritage landscape.

The Heritage Conservation Zone has historic value. It is partly centred around New Perlican Harbour, with its beach and sheltered cove to which New Perlican largely owes its conception as a fishing community. New Perlican was established as a small fishing base by the mid-1600s, making it one of the oldest fishing stations in Trinity Bay. The community has been respected for shipbuilding, and has been known as a place from which ships sailed to prosecute the seal fishery. The waterfront has a number of vernacular fishing stages and wharves, and the older, most densely residential section of the town is in close proximity to the shoreline.

Among its contributing resources the Heritage Conservation Zone includes a cluster of older institutional buildings of cultural value to the community. St. Matthew’s United Church (1913) and St. Matthew’s United Church Hall (1926) are located on Church Road, which then loops past St. Augustine’s Anglican Church (1927). Close by, at the intersection of Church Road and the main road, stands Waterloo Loyal Orange Lodge No. 18 (1931).

The culturally prominent institutional buildings also have environmental value in the community’s landscape because of their size and visual prominence as landmarks. St. Augustine’s Anglican Church is particularly visible because its spire is visible from the harbour and most points in New Perlican. The distinctive, twin-towered Orange Hall is located on the main road at the centre of the community.

Along with the collection of fisheries and marine structures hugging the harbour shoreline, the massing, scale, forms and styles of domestic buildings collectively contribute to the aesthetic value of the Heritage Conservation Zone. The earliest extant residences in the zone date from about 1900 and include mainly wooden, two-storey forms with low, mid or steeply pitched gable roofs or hipped roofs, and mansards. There are also residences constructed around the mid-century, particularly single-storey, wooden bungalows, as well as more recent homes. Some of the older residences retain original architectural details such as wooden windows and trims and visible stone foundations. A number of older, modest, wooden outbuildings and structures such as small sheds, stone root cellars and walls enhance the historic appearance of domestic properties.

Source: Town of New Perlican Municipal Plan 2001-2011 and Development Regulations, effective 2002/05/03

Character-Defining Elements

All those elements important to the historic, cultural, environmental and aesthetic values of the Heritage Conservation Zone:

-location of conservation zone in proximity to the harbour;
-vernacular styles and locations of fisheries buildings and structures;
-scale, massing, orientation and location of heritage institutional buildings such that they both form a cluster and are individually visually prominent;
-and style, massing, scale, mainly wooden construction and architectural features (such as roof types, stone foundations, wooden windows and doors) of older domestic buildings, including homes and outbuildings, occurring along with other domestic structures like stone cellars and walls.