Dan Goodland Downstairs Root Cellar Muncipal Heritage Structure

The Dan Goodland Downstairs Root Cellar has historic, architectural, aesthetic and cultural values.

The Dan Goodland Downstairs Root Cellar was built in 1915 and has historic value given its age and because it survives from a time before modern day refrigeration was the norm in rural Newfoundland. Such structures were heavily relied on for storing and preserving foodstuffs.

The Dan Goodland Downstairs Root Cellar has architectural value as a good example of utilitarian design and functionality. Root cellars such as this were common in rural locations to store vegetables and other food items. They were built to moderate temperature and humidity. The Dan Goodland Root Cellar is of the type that is built into the side of a hill, the most prevalent kind in the Maberly area. It has a wooden front door of vertical board, surrounded by exposed stone construction. It is otherwise surrounded by the natural hill and covered in sod.

The Dan Goodland Downstairs Root Cellar has aesthetic significance in the cultural landscape of Elliston. It is one structure in a larger, community-wide collection of root cellars that makes the community’s landscape remarkable. Together with the Jim Goodland Upstairs Root Cellar built by Dan’s brother, it is part of the distinctive formation known as the Twin Cellars or the Upstairs-Downstairs Cellars.

Still in use, the Dan Goodland Downstairs Root Cellar also has cultural value in Elliston. Root cellars have a connection to a subsistence economy where people farmed, hunted, fished and gathered the raw ingredients for much of their family’s own food. Once so commonplace, root cellars have become symbolic of the history of subsistence in rural Newfoundland and particularly of the Town of Elliston, which declared itself Root Cellar Capital of the World in 2000.