The Hancock Premises

Built for Mobility

Buildings on Fogo Island, both houses and sheds, were designed and built for mobility. They sit on wooden supporting poles called “shores” rather than directly on levelled ground. Shores vary in size and were placed to negotiate the sloping, rockey ground around the coast. They need to be regularly maintained and replaced.

After the building was detached from the poles, they were attached to slides and dragged across the frozen harbour in winter. In the summer, the fishermen would attach several empty cylinders to its perimeter so that it could stay afloat and be moved by boats to the new destination.

Cecil Hancock was the last resident who lived in the traditional house at the Punt Premises. Cecil’s father, Harvey Hancock, now lives in a nearby house. From him and others, we gathered our knowledge of the history of the premises. The original building was built by Cecil’s great grand father William Hancock around the 1860’s. His grand father Alfred Hancock later added the back kitchen extension.

In the 1950’s, Harvey bought a two storey shed from Thomas William Freake, and a stage from Charles Brett. He managed to launch both buildings from Brown’s Point to their current location. He would used the shed to store fishing gear, as a workshop for knitting nets and making shoes. He built the cribbing that supports the store and the stage, using wood harvested from the centre and south of the island and dragged it to Joe Batt’s Arm with his horses.

Store 2 belonged to Cecil’s cousin, Brian Hancock. Brian’s grand father Jim Hancock, who built the store, is Alfred Hancock’s brother. This store was associated to a long gone stage and a house across the road. Cecil and Brian probably fished together and worked in the fishing stage with other members of the extended family to produce salt cod.

We know that a minimal footprint is easier to heat in the winter, more movable, and faster to build. The houses have evolved as an ingenious response to the long winters, the proximity to the ocean, and the limited availability of local materials, manpower, and transportation. How small can a building be, and is size related to a given locality? It turns out that old houses have a specific and common proportion on Fogo Island.

The original Cecil Hancock house is small, fifteen by twenty-two feet and twelve feet high — similar to the sheds in size, but filled with life. In the past, many houses of this size would accommodate at least a dozen people at a time.

What determine the height of the old houses to twelve feet? Were people limited by the size of lumber (corner post) they could transport via a boat at one time? Certainly, a low profile house helps with wind protection, and the increase in cost of a longer log would have been significant in the past.

Recycling was a determining concern in both the design and construction of buildings. We learned that people rarely built with exclusively new materials in the past, especially if they could salvage structural members from other buildings. Perhaps these common proportions helped to facilitate the recycling of building materials, therefore reducing the overall building costs. Living in a remote environment — an island off an island, people value resources more, out of necessity. As a result, resources last longer thanks to this constant process of transformation and reinvention.

Houses also grow and expand, like a living thing. Like many houses around the island, the Cecil Hancock house includes a later expansion to make space for a bigger kitchen and more bedrooms on the second floor. This type of expansion is commonly known as the back kitchen, which will be detached from the original building to facilitate house launching.

Shorefast is a registered Canadian charity based on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, which operates with a mission to build economic and cultural resilience on Fogo Island.

We have committed to preserving and to carrying forward the knowledge contained in Fogo Island’s traditional small wooden boat, the punt. As part of that commitment, we are restoring a fishing premises in the community of Joe Batt’s Arm. Comprising a family house, two fisherman’s lofts, a fishing stage, and a new floating dock to launch and haul up punts, the property will become known as the Punt Centre.

Here on this blog, you can follow the progression of this heritage restoration and learn about traditional outport Newfoundland architecture, and in so doing, explore the balance between heritage and modern restoration, people and architecture, design and purpose, as well as culture and locality.

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