Survival included learning how to fish and accepting tile life of a fisherman. You fished six months of the year and hoped you earned enough to pay for the goods and supplies you used during the year. If you agreed to sell to the local merchant all of the dried fish you produced during the year, he would extend you a line of credit. With this you could buy anything you needed: boats, fishing equipment, salt, food stuffs, clothing and building supplies. The system was called the « truck system » of credit…

White, Al (2000) Douglastown Historical Review. Issue #2 (Spring).

On the top of a hill, overlooking a spit of sand that divides an ocean from a river’s estuary…sits an imposing Catholic church dedicated to St. Patrick… [It is] hugged by three buildings, a school, a hall, and a presbytery… Together, these buildings dominate the landscape through their proximity, their uniformity, and their positioning. They likewise embody stories about the past and present of the people who live in this place.

Leggo, Angelina (2020) Local Irishness: storytelling, heritage, and place attachment in Douglastown, Québec. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland: 1.

« Most every house had a fiddle in it, you know? They always had a fiddle, an old organ, or a piano. And people would gather together and visit in the evenings and they would make music. It was a lot of that in my time, back in the 40s and 50s, it was all that … »

Interview excerpt from: Patterson, Glenn (2015) Fiddle Music and the Constitution of Musical Affect on (and away from) the Gaspé Coast: Interpreting Musical Affordance, Motion, and Emotion through Turino’s Peircian Framework. MUSICultures 42(2): 34.