St. Peter's Lodge SUF #12, Victoria Hall, Registered Heritage Structure

Victoria Hall of St. Peter’s Lodge of the Society of United Fishermen #12 has been designated a Provincial Registered Heritage Structure owing to it historic, cultural and architectural values as a building which first served a commercial purpose, and then became headquarters for several socially significant community-based organizations in the Twillingate vicinity. The lodge appears to have started its existence as a storehouse during the era when Twillingate was the major mercantile centre for the western area of Notre Dame Bay. The building was used by the merchant firm of Messrs. Waterman & Co., which was established in the 1860s, a successor of the area’s prominent Slade and Cox firms. Messrs. Waterman & Co. had a number of premises in the Twillingate-Fogo area in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and outfitted schooners for the Labrador fishery.

In 1868-69 the local North Star Division #15, the Twillingate branch of the Sons of Temperance, a fraternal organization promoting abstinence from alcohol, purchased the property from Messrs. Waterman & Co. for 45 pounds and renovated the building for their own purposes. It was dubbed Victoria Hall in honour of the reigning monarch. From that point, the building became a community institution. By 1875 the local Society of United Fishermen (SUF), then a fairly new fraternal/occupational benevolent organization founded in the Trinity Bay area of Newfoundland, was also headquartered at the site. That same year, the building also began to serve as a lodge for the local Crosby Lodge of the Loyal Orange Association, a Protestant fraternal organization.

The Orangemen used the building until 1909, when they moved across the street to Alexandra Hall, and The Sons of Temperance continued to it use it as a Temperance Hall until 1917. Both organizations sold their shares to the SUF, which maintained ownership until 2003. Over the course of more than a century, the building in its roles as a Temperance Hall, Orange Lodge and SUF Lodge provided a venue for a range of meetings, lectures, celebrations including organizational anniversaries, New Year’s events and wedding receptions, and gatherings for teas, dancing, singing, recitations, showing movies and other entertainment, as well as politicking, establishing it a significant place in community life and memory.

Architecturally and aesthetically, Victoria Hall is fairly typical of lodges of its provenance, with its single storey, rectangular form on wooden shores, mid-pitch roof with the entrance in the gable end, fanlight and wheel window over the entrance, sizable arched windows with moulded trim in the front and along the sides, and narrow white painted clapboard exterior. Over the years, through its adaptation from a company storehouse to a community building and subsequent changes and repairs, elements such as the deep scrolled eaves returns, open covered porch, and SUF sign have been added. The latter identifies the lodge and features the SUF initials and symbols, including the triangle representing the shape and three capes of Newfoundland, Maltese Cross, crown, Union Jack, and the colours red, white and blue, representing the SUF ideals of Love, Purity and Fidelity.