Heritage home restoration project uncovers a piece of lost St. John's history

A two-and-a-half storey Second Empire-style house towers over Pleasant Street in the west end of St. John's. The fully detached structure is set back from the road with broad bay windows drawing the south-facing sunlight into each floor.

From its vantage point, this house has witnessed 142 years of St. John's evolution. Built in 1882, this house survived the Great Fire and several others. It watched as the city's first and last electric streetcar came and went. It looked on as iron steamers replaced wooden-hulled sailing ships in the harbour.

Tyler Stapleton, 31, has a timeless quality to him. A soft-spoken man from just outside of St. John's, his passion for heritage and urban planning seems fitting. A ship navigation officer by trade, he has volunteered for the Newfoundland and Labrador Historic Trust since 2015. That was also the year he met his match, and bought it: the Simms House.

"It was all covered in vinyl siding and a lot of the details were stripped off, but I kind of see what could be," says Stapleton, who has been working at this restoration project for the last nine years.

Nothing makes a local historian like embarking on a heritage restoration project. Stapleton has spent immeasurable time over the years poring through old city maps, photo archives, and hundred-year-old newspaper clippings in order to replicate the structure's 19th century characteristics the best he can.

Until now, his focus had been on the structure itself: ripping up floorboards, rebuilding its stone foundation, painting the siding a lavish dark red. It was only until recently that decided to crack open another can of mystery. 

"Doing some research and looking at old maps and insurance atlases and things, I learned that there was a cooperage, a two-storey cooperage here," Stapleton says.

A cooperage is workshop where wooden barrels are made. Used for the storage and transportation of one of the province's main exports, saltfish, the coopering industry was central to the livelihoods of many Newfoundlanders until well into the mid-1900s.

The Simms cooperage would have represented a mid-sized operation in St. John's industrial west end.

"There's still some mysteries here to figure out," he says, for there was nothing but grass in his empty backyard when he moved in.

"Was the building taken apart and dismantled or did it just rot and collapse?"

To uncover this hidden story, Stapleton needed help. 

He decided to find out what he could about the home's most notable owner, Henry V. Simms.

Henry V. Simms bought the Pleasant Street home in 1902. He was a cooper — or barrel-maker — by trade and a vocal member of the Prohibition Canvassing Committee in St. John's. Generations of the family lived under this mansard roof thereafter.