Paddy Miller House Municipal Heritage Building

Paddy Miller Heritage House has historic, cultural and aesthetic values in Southern Harbour.

Paddy Miller Heritage House has historic value as one of the oldest extant houses in Southern Harbour, and because of its connection to the Resettlement Programme administered by the Newfoundland Government in the 1960s to move residents from outlying communities into growth centres. The house was built around 1920 by Walter Ingram in Harbour Buffett, a small community on Long Island in inner Placentia Bay which signed up for resettlement. Fisherman Patrick (Paddy) Miller from Prowseton, another community participating in the Resettlement Programme, purchased and floated the house by barge to Southern Harbour, a relocation destination for more than 400 Placentia Bay residents, in 1967.

Paddy Miller Heritage House has cultural value given its current function as a museum in Southern Harbour, and because of its connection to the theme of 1960s resettlement. It is a theme that has registered strongly in the collective psyche of the province. The controversy over the "Fisheries Household Resettlement Programme" and its social and cultural fallout have been expressed through local art, theatre, music and literature, while contemporaneous resettlement photographs have become iconic images.

Paddy Miller Heritage House, itself, has become representative of the resettlement era. Its relocation from Harbour Buffett to Southern Harbour in 1966 was featured on the popular CBC local television show “Land and Sea” for an episode documenting resettlement. Nearly forty years later the show featured the house again when the Town of Southern Harbour moved it within the community to preserve it, and restored Paddy Miller’s House.

Paddy Miller Heritage House also has aesthetic value, in that the square, slant-roofed two-storey with felt roofing and wooden sheathing, windows and doors with quite plain trims is typical of a type of early to mid-twentieth century vernacular dwelling in rural Newfoundland.