A man who has dedicated his life to recording and preserving the history of an entire area of Conception Bay North has completed his most ambitious project to date. Stan Deering has been working on the Shades of the Past building complex in Flatrocks, Carbonear for the past two decades. He has added several traditional-style buildings over the years, all based on his childhood memories and knowledge passed down from local residents, but it is his latest project that he is most proud of—a traditional earthen house. Some of the early settlers in the Conception Bay North area first built houses out of dirt or sod, and while Deering says he never saw one built, he based his construction on information he gathered from older residents over the years. He took notes when he talked to people about how the houses were built, and in recent years he took the notes and started putting them together. Deering, who is in his 70s, says it took a lot of hard work to cut sod, lift and heave logs and lay the stones. Despite the time-consuming nature of the project, he managed to do it in a year. Photographs of Deering’s traditional earth house and his collection of local family history and memorabilia can be seen at the Shades of the Past Museum in the Flatrocks above Freshwater, Carbonear.
