Roddickton

Roddickton is a logging community in Canada Bay on the east coast of the Great Northern Peninsula. Originally known as Eastern Brook, the area was frequented for salmon fishing, hunting and trapping by residents of Englee and other headland fishing communities from an early date.

In 1905 the Grenfell Mission sent men from St. Anthony and Hare Bay to Eastern Brook to build a schooner for the Mission. In 1906 the Mission began a sawmilling operation on the site, which was named Roddickton after Newfoundland-born doctor Sir Thomas G. Roddick, a supporter of the Mission. The first settlers, then, were people hired by the Mission from Englee and Wild Cove to be mill hands and loggers. Grenfell also had land cleared, with the intention of growing crops for the St. Anthony hospital. Roddickton had a population of 46 by 1911. By 1921, however, there were only eight people. The next year the mill was closed and the settlement was all but abandoned.

Four years later, however, Englee merchant John Reeves returned to begin another sawmilling operation. The mill expanded soon afterward when the Carbonear lumber dealers and furniture makers Saunders and Howell acquired it. After Saunders and Howell moved additional mill machinery from Norris Arm, annual production rose to 5,000,000 running feet. In the late 1930s Bowater's began pulpwood cutting in the area and acquired the Saunders and Howell timber rights. Employment increased dramatically as people flocked to Roddickton from all over White Bay, the population increasing to 548 by 1945. Sawmilling once again provided an important source of employment after 1958, when Chester Dawe Ltd. of St. John's opened a mill. Lumber operations in the area were again expanded in the early 1970s.

In the 1960s the construction of a road on the east side of Canada Bay ended Roddickton's isolation and gave another boost to population growth as the community developed into the area's service and supply centre. Other people arrived from a number of communities in White Bay under the resettlement program. By 1961 the community boasted a population of 1185.

This period of growth was followed by scaling back, and then eventually by the closing of Bowater's pulpwood operation, leaving the sawmill as the only large employer in the town. The community experienced further economic difficulties in the 1980s with reductions in lumber output. A crab plant was opened and provided some additional employment, but Roddickton experienced disastrous fires in the late 1980s which damaged both the crab plant and sawmill. In 1992, the sawmill was back in operation at a reduced capacity and the crab plant rebuilt, but not reopened.
In 2006 the Town had a population of 900 with the largest employer being Holson Forest Products which operates an integrated sawmill on the site of the former Northchip Ltd. Operation.