Catching Up - Accolades for James P. Howley

I haven't posted anything in a while, it has been a long Spring and I've had two bad colds and a stomach bug, but I'm back on my feet again and still working on the Three Rock Cove piece.  I am very pleased with how it is coming about.  I love fleshing out the shapes and textures I find in these structures.  Things I didn't even notice until I have brush in hand, standing in front of the canvas and intensely studying the photographs from the site; curved lines, jagged lines, broken lines, smooth here, rough there, split apart, caved in...what stories these rocks tell!






In an earlier post (October 2013) I mentioned that James P. Howley's name was put forward to the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada to be considered as a person of historical significance.  I found out recently that the Board had accepted the nomination and Howley is now a person of historical significance in Canada!  This means he will be marked by a plaque at The Rooms.

Here's an excerpt from the Minutes of July 2012 Board meeting:

Four significant points for which he was recommended for designation:

1. His study of the Beothuk Indians published in 1915 remains the cornerstone of all subsequent research on the subject;
2. He is regarded as the creator of the institution that became the provincial museum in Newfoundland and Labrador and served as its first curator, overseeing the consolidation and expansion of core collections;
3. He trained under Alexander Murray, his work as an assistant and then as Director of the Geological and Topographical Survey of Newfoundland between 1868 and 1909 produced much of the scientific basis for understanding the geography of the interior Newfoundland, its geology and mineral deposits;
4. His memoirs are a valuable record of Newfoundland's earliest scientific explorations from a personal perspective and constitute a unique historical record of late 19th and early 20th century Newfoundland life beyond St. John's.

In my early days of research I was fascinated with the writings from his field books.  The geology was interesting in itself for me but his tales of travelling around the province on foot and visiting the outports were truly a glimpse of Newfoundland at that time.  I enjoyed seeing the landscape through his eyes, the grand vista of the Humber Valley from Mount Seemore and the pleasures of canoeing a "verdant" tree-lined steady.  From sleeping in "comfortable quarters" to shivering in a "miserable tilt", his enthusiasm for fieldwork was infectious and I found myself wondering why he wasn't really well known to the general public.

Many thanks to Gerald Penney and Derek Wilton for submitting this nomination.