Main Brook

Main Brook is a fishing and lumbering community on the southwest shore of Hare Bay on the east coast of the Great Northern Peninsula. English presence in the Main Brook area was likely predated by the Maritime Archaic Indians, the Dorset Eskimos and possibly by the Beothuk. The French also frequented the region from the 1500s. English settlers (particularly from Notre Dame Bay) began to trickle into the area by the 1800s, but not until the 1900s did substantial permanent English settlement occur, attracted by cod and salmon as well as by heavy forests.

Family tradition holds that Main Brook was founded around 1920 when the Simms family moved there from St. Anthony. Later in the 1920s, Thomas Coates, from Eddies Cove, settled there and established a sawmill. By the time Main Brook first appeared in the 1935 Census it contained 60 people.

Employment by this time was almost exclusively in the forest industry. Residents worked for local sawmills or for larger operations
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