30 years after the cod moratorium gutted this once-thriving town, a few stubborn souls refuse to let go

It’s a Friday afternoon in Trepassey, and Rita Pennell is preparing herself for a fight with the Newfoundland and Labrador government come Monday morning.

The town’s last remaining doctor has joined the long list of people to flee this old fishing town, and locals want to know why the health authority isn’t offering incentives to stay. Pennell has seen this town take a beating since the cod fishery closed in 1992, but problems like this still eat at her as much today as they did 30 years ago.

That’s why, at 85 years of age, Rita Pennell is still the mayor of Trepassey — or at least what’s left of it.

“We had everything we needed here. Nobody planned on leaving,” she said, standing near the remnants of the town’s former fish plant. “Until all of this happened.”

When the federal government announced an end to cod fishing here in 1992, most people in Trepassey weren’t surprised. Their plant shut down the year before, putting 600 people out of work in a town that then had a population of 1,375 — more than three times what’s there now.

The moratorium, for them, was just confirmation there would be no comeback. With that, people left in droves.

Trepassey today represents a harsh reality in rural Newfoundland and Labrador. For every fishing village that reinvented itself as a tourism hotspot after 1992, there are dozens of places like this — where a few hundred people are fighting a losing battle against time, opportunity and common sense. Some are eternal optimists. Some are stubborn pessimists. For most, it just depends on the weather.

This is the story of those people — the ones who won’t let their hometown die.

Wayne Cave filleted cod at the Fishery Products International (FPI) plant for 20 years. He was proud of his job, and still brags about being a top performer at the plant.

“We were the best yield-takers on every species of fish that was landed over here,” Cave said. “We were on top. We had the best yield, the best of everything over there.”

Trepassey was a crown jewel of the fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador — a place where the fish plant paid performance bonuses and overtime was limitless. People made a comfortable living in a small town with stores, clubs and restaurants.

“It was like a small city,” Pennell said. “We had everything you could ever want here.”

By the late 1980s, though, Atlantic cod was dwindling. Changes in technology and increased demand from global markets led to a dramatic rise in fishing pressure, which in turn led to an epic collapse in the cod population.

On Oct. 7, 1991, Wayne Cave went to work at the Trepassey plant for the last time. The next day, there were locks on the doors.

“I remember the day,” he said, looking across the water at the site of the old plant. “That job meant everything to me.”

People took to the streets in protest. They demanded FPI keep the plant open. They demanded the provincial government take it over and find a new operator. They demanded the federal government do more to compensate the workers.

In the end, they got a revolving door of “fly-by-night” companies taking government grants in exchange for new factories at the former fish plant. There was a company making dental equipment. Another made jewellery boxes. One made light bulbs, another bottled water. One even wanted to make frozen dim sum.

Some gave an honest effort. Others simply took the money and ran. None remain today.

Without steady work, about 400 people left Trepassey in the first five years after the plant closed. Cave watched his friends and family leave for St. John’s, Toronto and Fort McMurray, as he mulled over a tough question throughout 1992 — is it worth staying if you have to go on welfare to survive?

For most people, the answer was no. But Cave couldn’t bring himself to leave.

“This is my home,” he said. “Where else are you going to go and get settled in as good? Fast cars, fast cities, more money? No. That wasn’t for me.”

Young families were the first to leave, Cave said.

By 2006, the population was cut in half. Today, it’s down to about 400 people — a fraction of what it used to be.

The changes to the school system were drastic. There were more than 700 kids between the town’s two schools at their peak. Today, there are 26.

“When you have no youth, you have no future really,” Pennell said. “I always thought our youth was our future.”

It became difficult to attract long-term investment to a town with no children. Despite boasting gorgeous scenery and sitting just two hours from St. John’s, tourism didn’t take off in Trepassey like it did in other places. When Bonavista and Twillingate were making that transition, Trepassey was still trying to resuscitate its industrial past.

In a town full of boarded up buildings, a window factory was the last steady employer, before moving its 15 jobs to St. John’s in 2010.

“It’s sad,” Pennell said of the outlook in town. “But we’re fighting every day.”

John Devereaux’s accountant told him to never make a business decision based on emotion. His mother says he was never really one for listening.

Born and raised in Trepassey, Devereaux left after high school to play basketball at Memorial University. He had a brief stint playing pro ball in Germany before embarking on a business career in St. John’s. In 2015, despite doing well in the city, he felt something pulling him back to the inn his grandmother had started nearly 50 years earlier.

“John called and he said, ‘I think we’re going to buy the inn,’” said his mother, Carol Ann Devereaux. “I said ‘You’re crazy. But what do you want me to do?’”

John Devereaux asked his mother to move home from Ottawa and help run the business. He thinks she’s a little crazy, too, because she said yes.

They took over the business from John’s father — Carol Ann’s ex-husband — who had done his best to transform the inn and restaurant from a place tailored to visiting workers, to a place sought out by tourists. The fact he was able to keep the business alive after 1992 is a gargantuan feat, the Devereauxs say.

John jumped at the opportunity in part because of Mistaken Point — a nearby geological site that features the world’s oldest known fossils of living creatures. There was speculation in 2015 it would be designated a UNESCO World Heritage site, which had potential to draw tourists to the Trepassey region.

“We bought it even before UNESCO was announced, so we took a little risk,” John said.

What followed was seven years of renovations, two years of a crushing pandemic and more headaches than the Devereauxs had ever imagined. Carol Ann is now “retired,” yet can still be found waiting tables and taking reservations most days of the week.

She spent 25 years on the mainland, far away from the inn her mother had founded, but now she just can’t find it in herself to let go.

On a Friday night in Trepassey, the mother and son bounce around the restaurant introducing themselves to tourists and saying hello to old friends as they convert the dining room into a concert hall for an event.

On the bill for this evening is a 95th anniversary celebration of Amelia Earhart’s flight from Trepassey on her quest to become the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air. Three singer-songwriters take the stage with songs dedicated to the aviator’s 12-day visit in 1928, and filmmaker Lorne Warr screens his documentary on the subject.

In attendance are tourists from Ontario, British Columbia and Germany, as well as a European couple who just bought a property in town.

The sounds of music spill out into the street, and the keg taps are flowing all night. This is the future of Trepassey, John says — a place where people come together in the summer months before sinking back into a slumber after the tourism season.

It might not be a prosperous future — or one that John’s accountant is thrilled about — but Trepassey isn’t going down without a pint.

“There’s always a party spirit in Trepassey,” John said. “No doubt about it.”

The sounds of live music reach Wayne Cave’s wharf, bouncing off the concrete surface before being drowned by the roar of his forklift.

He’s busy loading whelk — a sort of sea snail — into tubs of ice and hauling them into a pair of run-down storage buildings along the shoreline.

The fishery switched gears after 1992, with many fishermen changing their focus to crab. Cave made the switch from fish processor to fish harvester, and managed to rebuild a life for his family. It wasn’t enough to keep the plant open, but the switch was enough to keep a few boats in the harbour, and a few dozen people employed in Trepassey.

It wasn’t perfect, Cave said, but it was stable.

“To raise your kids up in a big city, you don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “We raised them here and it was good.”

Cave is a realist when it comes to the future of Trepassey. The town is filled with the ruins of his friends’ abandoned houses — concrete foundations left over like tombstones for homes that held precious memories. A handful of the ones still standing have for sale signs plastered in their windows, with one or two fewer zeroes than you’d see in most other places.

“I’m after seeing houses here, modern homes, being sold for pennies,” Cave said. “If their houses were in St. John’s, they’d be $300,000 houses. But here, they’re selling for $70,000, $60,000, $50,000.”

Cave knows tourism is a big part of Trepassey’s future, but still aches a little bit each time he sees one of those houses sold to an “outsider” for a vacation home, destined to sit shuttered for nine months out of the year.

“Our future here is what you see right now. There’s nobody else going to come back here to live.”

Rita Pennell missed out on the music that Friday night. There was no way she was skipping her youngest grandchild’s high school graduation in St. John’s.

As a grandmother of 11 and a great-grandmother of 12, she’s used to racking up mileage for trips like this. Nearly all her family has left Trepassey, and most born after 1992 never lived there in the first place.

Pennell doesn’t hide her surprise that she’s still the mayor of Trepassey.

She first sat on council in 1985, before taking over the top job in 1989. She guided the town through the moratorium years, speaking out whenever she felt the town was being slighted. She spent time as mayor, deputy mayor and councillor for over 35 years. She was also a paramedic for 40 years.

When the sitting mayor decided not to run for re-election in 2021, the town couldn’t get enough people to fill the seven council seats. So Pennell threw her name on the ballot again and became mayor.

The fire in her belly never went away. Pennell came back swinging, immediately taking up the fight to keep Trepassey’s second ambulance stationed in the community. The latest battle — to push the province to provide incentives to attract a family doctor — garnered support from the official opposition, which called the province’s actions “forced resettlement, just by a different name.”

Pennell intends to see out the remainder of this term, before deciding on what comes next. She hasn’t ruled out another run in 2025, which would make her the mayor into her early 90s. One thing is for sure — whether she continues on council or not, she’ll always be in Trepassey.

“I love this town and I have no intention of leaving. My family are all everywhere, but they keep coming back and forth. So I’m staying as long as possible. They might have to take me away in the ambulance.”

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