Mosquito no more

Foundations

Mosquito is a resettled community on Great Colinet Island and was our first stop Saturday on our circumnavigation. The community was resettled in the early 1960s under Joey Smallwood's resettlement program. You can check out the history of the program here if interested. There's lots of info on the web.

The census for 1925 shows 45 persons living in 11 households. The prominent families listed were Dobbin, Doody and Linehan. In 1935 there were 73 and in 1945, 70.

All that's left now are concrete foundations where the houses once stood. I suspect the houses were cannibalized for the wood because there was no evidence of structures left standing to let waste away.

Grassy field

Mosquito was one of the most suitable areas on the Avalon for agriculture. People who lived here grew their own vegetables and fished the sea. Living here meant all sources of sustenance had to be exploited.

Its said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes. What does this picture have to say? To most probably not much as there's not much going on, there's no action, only a lone spruce tree. But there was at one time. As I walked through the fields I thought about how much work early settlers of Mosquito put into clearing land to grow crops.

Nature retakes cemetery

The graveyard is always a draw for me in Newfoundland's resettled communities because the history of any place can be told by the headstones in the cemetery. In the case of Mosquito it appears the people who moved on to new communities have forgotten those predeceased. The cemetery was badly overgrown, some of the graves were sunken and headstones fallen.

I guess priorities change to making a go of it in the present rather than paying homage to the past. That's the way it is but to me its still sad.