Formal Recognition Type

Municipal Heritage Building, Structure or Land

Heritage Value

Paddy Miller House has been designated a municipal heritage site by the Town of Southern Harbour due to its historic, cultural and aesthetic value.

Paddy Miller House has historic value as one of the oldest extant houses in Southern Harbour, and because of its connection to resettlement programs administered by the Newfoundland Government from the 1950s to 1970s. These programs promoted the mass resettlement of isolated outports and encouraged their residents to move to so-called growth centres. The house was built around 1920 by Walter Ingram in Harbour Buffett, a small community on Long Island in inner Placentia Bay which signed up for resettlement. In 1966, fisherman Patrick (Paddy) Miller from Prowseton, another community participating in the resettlement program, purchased and floated the house by barge to Southern Harbour, a relocation destination for more than 400 Placentia Bay residents.

Paddy Miller House has cultural value because of its connection to resettlement. Government resettlement programs registered strongly in the collective psyche of the province. The controversy over the programs and the resultant social and cultural fallout have been expressed through local art, theatre, music and literature, while contemporaneous resettlement photographs have become iconic images. Paddy Miller House, itself, has become representative of the resettlement era. Its relocation from Harbour Buffett to Southern Harbour in the late 1960s was featured on a national CBC television show called This Land Of Ours. Almost four decades after it was moved, Paddy Miller’s daughter donated the house to the Town of Southern Harbour and it was moved again. CBC NL’s Land and Sea documented that move in an episode called “Paddy’s Miller’s House.”

Paddy Miller House also has aesthetic value, in that the square, slant-roofed two-storey with felt roofing and wooden sheathing, windows and doors with quite plain trims is typical of a type of early to mid-twentieth century vernacular dwelling in rural Newfoundland.

Source: Motion 2004/19, Town of Southern Harbour Council Town Council Meeting Minutes of 2004/03/03

Character Defining Elements

Exterior features related to the vernacular design of the building:

-two-storey, square form and dimensions;

-slanted roof with projecting eaves;

-felt roofing;

-wooden windows;

-wooden doors;

-original window and door openings and placement, and;

-narrow clapboard sheathing.

Community

Southern Harbour

Municipality

Town of Southern Harbour

Civic Address

042A Marine Drive

Construction (circa)

1920 - 1920

Builder

Walter Ingram

Style

Square