Ghost Villages...courtesy of the Canadian government

I've been to Newfoundland though not in the area described in this endlessly interesting article.  It is a land with the cleanest, freshest most exhilarating air you could ever breath.  It revitalizes you.

Perusing the following article is helpful in reminding us that governments often make disastrously stupid decisions (what a surprise) and that an entire way of life can be obliterated by their whims. We suffer such today in America though it takes a more sinister direction here.  Nevertheless the following article [h/t Lew Rockwell] is a fascinating read which shows what really happens when citizens hear those famous words, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help".

The article begins as follows:

The small village near Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, was once a charming place to live. A quaint, centuries-old fishing village, that overlooked the sea, with winding lanes, asymmetrical “saltbox” family homes, and quiet streets filled with a post office, church, and a graveyard. It would be an idyllic, country scene, apart from the fact there are no people.

The Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador is home to around 300 such ghost villages.

Between 1954 and 1975, around 30,000 people were relocated as part of controversial government “resettlement” programs. Today these abandoned villages are largely forgotten and unknown, except by those who once lived there.

Newfoundland and Labrador is a vast, beautiful, often remote and isolated place. The wild landscape is home to unusually named towns such as Come By Chance, Heart’s Desire, Happy Adventure and Chimney Tickle. Dotted sparingly along its miles of rugged shorelines, and in the shelter of its thousands of tiny islands, are the “outports”; small, tightly knit fishing villages, many dating as far back as the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

By the end of World War II, the population of Newfoundland stood at around 320,000, spread out over a thousand such settlements, three quarters of which held under 300 inhabitants. Some villages, such as Tacks Beach on King Island, had a population of several hundred, while others such as Pinchard’s Island, Bonavista Bay, had just eight families living there.

These communities were largely self-sufficient, and mostly isolated from each other. They lived by fishing the abundant cod and herring fields, and by logging and seal hunting.

But life in the outports was to change forever in 1949. That was the year Newfoundland and Labrador, Great Britain’s first permanent colony, voted to join Canada. Following confederation, the government began to take a keen interest in these hundreds of isolated communities. Pondering what to do with their vast new territory, with its rich fishing fields, it commissioned studies undertaken by the Department of Welfare and the Department of Fisheries.

Anthropologists dispatched from Memorial University in St. John’s....

                                                              Read the whole article.