5 PASTEEN STREET |
Newfoundland Tourism Region : Labrador
Zoar:
While this community has been "abandoned" early reference to the Moravian Missionary there (plus the fact that it is the only community that starts with the letter "z") sparked an interest in its name.
It is known was settled in 1865 and abandoned in 1889, as Wikipedia contributors state, making it "one of the first such communities to be abandoned".
From the ENL, comes the following history:
An abandoned community on the Labrador north coast, Zoar was located approximately 50 km southeast of Nain.
From 1865 to the early 1890s it was the site of a Moravian mission station, intended to be a gathering point for the settlers of the north coast.
In the mid-1800s there were several settler families (of mixed Inuit and European blood) at scattered sites between Nain and Hopedale, most of whom were at least nominally communicants of the Moravian Church.
The
mission had a long-standing policy of encouraging the Inuit to congregate at its stations and hoped to be able to provide more services to the settlers by establishing Zoar.
By 1884 the Zoar mission was recording a population of 139, although it seems likely that most of those enumerated continued to live at scattered homesteads between Voisey's Bay and Jack Lane's (Big) Bay.
The effort to centralize the population was not considered successful, and eventually it was decided to close the Zoar mission.
A new settler mission was begun to the south, at Makkovik, in 1896.
Thereafter Zoar remained home to one or two settler families, notably a branch of the Ford family of Ford's Harbour.
Residents in the 1940s included Mary Ford and her grandson George, who left in about 1950 for Happy Valley. Since that time Zoar has been a minor hunting and fishing station of Nain
Nothing from the above description sheds light however on how the community got its name.
Interestingly there are 15 communities that are also named Zoar. According to the website Roadsidethoughts.com they are located in Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York (2), North Carolina, Ohio (2), Virginia and Wisconsin, and finding out why the name is as common as it is, proved to be difficult.
One can assume that the name comes from the bible, and for that reason was chosen by the missionaries.
Wikipedia contributors offer the following history:
Zoara, the biblical Zoar, previously called Bela (Genesis 14:8), was one of the five "cities of the plain" - a pentapolis apparently located along the lower Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea plain and mentioned in the Book of Genesis.
It was said to have been spared the "brimstone and fire" which destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah in order to provide a refuge for Lot and his daughters. It is mentioned by Josephus; by Ptolemy (V, xvi, 4); and by Eusebius and Saint Jerome in the Onomasticon.
Owing to the waters coming down from the mountains of Moab, Zoara was said to be a flourishing oasis where the balsam, indigo, and date trees bloomed luxuriantly.
Zoara, meaning "small" or "insignificance" in Hebrew (a "little one" as Lot called it), was a city east of Jordan in the vale of Siddim, near the Dead Sea.
Along with Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim, Zoar was one of the 5 cities slated for destruction by God; but Zoar was spared at Lot's plea as his place of refuge (Genesis 19:20-23). Segor is the Septuagint form of "Zoar".
A Zoar is mentioned in Isaiah 15:5 in connection with the nation of Moab. This connection with Moab would be consistent with a location near the lower Dead Sea plain.
In a CBC article entitled "Returned to Zoar" a bit more of its history is revealed:
A new white picket fence stands in an abandoned community in a remote corner of Northern Labrador.
The fence marks the final resting place for 22 Inuit men and women. They've been on a long journey that began when their remains were exhumed from a cemetery in 1927 and left to languish in a Chicago vault.
The journey to right that wrong ended with a repatriation ceremony in late June when 22 boxes were reburied in the presence of 80 people from Nain and other parts of Labrador.
More than 80 years ago, archaeologist William Duncan Strong removed the bodies from their final resting place.
His interest was said to be scientific, but his research at the Chicago Field Museum didn't amount to much.
"We know that he knew it was wrong, and the institution knew it was wrong because they tried to cover it up and kept it secret, so they had a real awareness the community was unhappy," said Helen Robins, the museum's director of repatriations who attended the ceremony.
There are still more Inuit remains exhumed from different grave sites, waiting to be returned to Labrador. So, there will be more reburials, and more memorials, correcting the misdeeds of the past.
A very recent article, by Aaron Spitzr, a Historian, Political Scientist, and Journalist was published in 2020 on the Adventure Canada website.
Entitled "When the Lord Came to Labrador: A Little History of the Moravians in Nunatsiavut" it is included as it clearly outlined the impact that the Moravians had in Labrador:
The Arctic has long been a crossroads of Indigenous peoples and Europeans. Before Columbus even arrived in the New World, people living on Baffin Island possessed Viking goods brought over from Norse settlements in Greenland.
Four hundred years ago, Inuit in Labrador fought the Basque whalers who came each summer to the Strait of Belle Isle. And three hundred years ago, English and French traders did business with Cree and Inuit trappers on Hudson Bay.
But these interactions were mostly fleeting. The white men were in the Arctic yet almost never of it. They lived aboard their ships or in their forts, a universe apart from the Indigenous groups who visited briefly and then decamped back into the countryside.
That all changed in 1771, when devotees of an obscure Protestant sect from Germany and the Czech Republic arrived on the Labrador coast.
They did not come to hunt, trade, and then race home. Rather, they sought to immerse themselves in the Inuit world-while immersing Inuit in theirs. These were the first Arctic missionaries: the Moravians.
At this time in North American history, England had just defeated France for control of what would become Canada. Farther south, the American Revolution was underway. Meanwhile, in Labrador, hostilities lingered between Inuit and
Europeans.
A first Moravian attempt at proselytizing, in 1752, had ended with seven missionaries killed. It took the intervention of Mikak, a charismatic Inuk woman who'd spent time in England, to broker peace on the coast and make Moravians
welcome.
Thus, came fourteen brethren, led by Jens Haven, to establish the first ever mission to Inuit in what would become Canada.
The Moravians named their first station Nain-to this day, the main population centre in Nunatsiavut, the Inuit region of Labrador.
Over the next 133 years, seven more Moravian mission stations were built, at Okak (1776), Hopedale (1782), Hebron (1830), Zoar (1865), Ramah (1871), Makkovik (1896), and Killinek (1904).
Every mission station was similar, featuring an unadorned Germanic church, as well as a communal house, school, trading post, cemetery, and gardens.
Each station was home to as many as a dozen missionaries. They would remain in Labrador for years, or even for life.
All learned the local dialect of Inuttut, to better preach and tend to their congregations. Once or twice a year, the Moravian ship Harmony would visit, providing a link to the outside world. Otherwise, the missions were self-sufficient.
As for the locals, they converted to Moravianism slowly but steadily. By 1820, around 600 Inuit were considered to be Christian.
For the most part, they continued their traditional seasonal rounds of hunting, fishing, and trapping, but would camp near the missions between Christmas and Easter, participating in church services, receiving rudimentary medical care, and trading sealskins, dried fish, and handicrafts for flour, tea, cloth, or guns.
Also, during these times, Inuit children would attend school, which was conducted in Inuttut. Indeed, the Labrador Inuktitut dialect was the first in Canada to be written down.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the missions began to close. Zoar was shuttered in 1894. Okak closed in 1919 when the local population was tragically decimated by the Spanish flu.
In 1926, the Moravians transferred their trading operations to the Hudson Bay Company. After Newfoundland entered confederation with Canada in 1949, the province took over schooling in Labrador. now conducting it in English.
In 1959, due to the expense of operating an outpost as remote as Hebron, the mission was closed, and its residents were forcibly relocated south, to detrimental effect. In 2005, after 234 years in Labrador, the Moravian Church recalled its last missionary.
However, Moravianism remains strong in Nunatsiavut, carried on by Inuit lay ministers, church elders, chapel servants, and the like.
Moreover, local culture bears notable Moravian influences. Labradorimiut music merges Inuit and Germanic influences; to this day, visiting ships are often greeted by brass bands playing Bach and Haydn.
Likewise, the modern Inuttut dialect is inflected with German, including the days of the week and numbers, such as suvai (zwei) and tarai (drei).
Many Inuit, too, bear Germanic names, not least of whom being the current president of the
Nunatsiavut government, Johannes Lampe.
Used with permission from "Uncovering the Origin of 1001 Unique Place Names in Newfoundland and Labrador" 2021 Jennifer Leigh Hill
Address of this page: http://nl.ruralroutes.com/Zoar