English Harbour West
Neighbourhood



48 Harbour Dr.
English Harbour West, A0H 1M0


Newfoundland Tourism Region : Central


English Harbour West: According to the Central Newfoundland Tourism website, English Harbour West is the largest community of the six communities.

The backdrop to the town is English Harbour Mountain from which you can see most of the other communities in the area. History suggests that the first settlers came during the late 1700s from West Country England, England and the Jersey Islands.

Lobsters and cod fishing were the mainstay on which the community was settled, and this community was "home to one of the most successful Grand Bank schooner operations on the south coast".

Why it is named English Harbour West is unknown, but undoubtedly it must have reminded the fishermen from their homeland.

English Harbour East and English Harbour West: One would probably assume that these two communities would be side-by-side, however such is not the case. While both are on Fortune Bay, in fact they are across the bay from each other, and in order to get to one from the other by car would result in a 6-hour drive (whereas by boat of course it would be just a "hop, skip and jump"). English Harbour East was settled in the early 1800s, and according to information contained in the ENL, it was settled by "English fishermen and their families who came to Fortune Bay via the English merchant company of Newman's and the Jersey firm of Nicolle and Company".

According to the same source," English Harbour East has a good anchorage and is sheltered from all but winds from the south. It was noted on Captain James Cook's 1764 map of the south coast". The town's name originally was English Harbour and appears as such on the 1836 census, however in 1869, it appears for the first time as English Harbour East to distinguish it from English Harbour West, across the bay. In the ENL it is written:

The steady growth of the settlement and its ability to attract new families lay, like other area settlements, in the success of its cod and herring fisheries and in its ties with the major merchant firms of Fortune Bay, which marketed the catch, refined the cod oil and supplied goods to the settlements....Like other Fortune Bay communities (although it seems to a lesser extent because of its position near the head of the bay), English Harbour East also prospered with the sale of bait to United States traders. This was despite proclamations forbidding such commerce and the patrol of Fortune Bay waters by wardens who frequently (with little success) warned resident fishermen of the law and incurred their wrath. One such case was at English Harbour East, where the patrolling officer warned an offender and wearily reported; "got a fair share of slang [abuse] here from sea-lawyer Hackett, 2 seines, 5 crafts".

While the population of English Harbour East was never much more than 200 (recorded as 210 residents in 1945), overtime with the decrease in the fishery industry, the population slowly began to diminish. In 2016 there were 139 residents, a decrease of 5.4% from the previous count of 147 in 2011. English Harbour West is one of the six communities that make up St. Jacques-Coomb's Cove and will be covered later in the section on Coves.

Used with permission from" Uncovering the Origin 0f 1001 Unique Place Names in Newfoundland and Labrador" 2021 Jennifer Leigh Hill

Address of this page: http://nl.ruralroutes.com/EnglishHarbourWest



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