Small
Port Union, journey through a ” Union Built Town,” founded in 1916 by Sir William Ford Coaker and the Fishermen’s Protective Union. Follow in the footsteps of the union leader, Sir William Ford Coaker, and the union members and discover how a union changed the social fabric of a country. The Fishermen’s Protective Union became a force in the Newfoundland Government.
A rural Newfoundland community became the center of activity with a large retail store that served forty-outlet store, a salt fish plant with electric driers, seal plant, an international fish and supply trade with Europe, West Indies, and South America, a fleet of schooners, a spur line railway, a weekly newspaper “The Fishermen’s Advocate,” coal shed, salt shed, cooperage, carpenter shop, row housing for the workers, a soft drink bottling factory, a hotel, a storage facility with electric elevators, its own power generating plant, a movie theatre, a large convention center, and church built to commemorate the Coaker Recruits in World War I.
View the families who came and stayed to form a community: from the forge workers, fishermen, captains, dockworkers, factory workers and managers who joined together and founded a town built on the spirit of “unionism.”
