by Lester Green
Often, we reflect on times gone by and challenge our minds to think about the earliest settlers, the true pioneers of our province. What would life be like to depend entirely on land and sea? What were the challenges of harvesting a virgin forest and the waters that washed its shorelines? As a former teacher, I considered the challenges of educating children.
Historical records provide insight into this harsh, primitive lifestyle of the earliest European settlers in the Southwest Arm area of Trinity Bay.
Clay Pits, a now-abandoned community, is historically referred to as part of Random in the Southwest Arm area. Other than a grassy meadow slowly reclaimed by the forest and an overgrown, quaint little cemetery, there’s little evidence that this community existed and that the Vardy and Benson families eked out a living from land and sea.
Hidden among the trees, surrounded by patches of unkempt grasslands, one will discover what appears to be an enchanted graveyard whose white limestone grave markers lie in the shadows of the tall trees that have rejuvenated since the last settler cut firewood.
Clay Pits was located on a relatively flat, fertile plain where the settlers created small meadows for subsistence living as they harvested the trees in their backyards. The forest seemed endless and backed into the base of a hill known today as Old Vardy’s Hill.
By the 1850s, the Benson and Vardy families occupied this land. One kilometre away was another community called Batt’s Cove, occupied by the Shaw brothers and a family of Martins related to the Shaws. These Grates Cove families had migrated across Trinity Bay, leaving their homes, searching for new land and opportunities.
A family of Jacobs at nearby Little Harbour, former settlers of Bay De Verde, may have unknowingly described the settlers’ fears of this wilderness when their son, William Henry, died in 1860 at the age of 8. Records show he was buried at Clay Pits, but the parents were so distraught that they had the body disinterred and transported by boat back to their former home of Bay de Verde for a proper burial in sacred ground.
Clay Pit’s best-known settler was George Vardy, born at Burton Green, Christchurch, England, on May 8, 1818. He first arrived on the shore of Newfoundland in the community of Grates Cove around 1840. Due to the lack of available land, his family moved to the Southwest Arm area by the 1850s.
He can be best described as a teacher, preacher, healer, matcher and dispatcher who served the communities of Fox Harbour (re-named Southport), Heart’s Ease, Gooseberry Cove, Butter Cove, Batt’s Cove, and Little Harbour area. He was the Justice of the Peace and instrumental in filing several petitions for funds from the Government of Newfoundland to construct and maintain a cart road between Clay Pits and Heart’s Ease Beach. This road was well constructed and still exists 160 years later. A culvert constructed from slate still functions near the top of Old Vardy’s Hill, bearing testimony to the engineering in the 1860s.
Reverend R. Holland Taylor offers the best description of Mr. Vardy in a document entitled Two Missionaries at Random, 1879:
“…For twenty years, Mr. Vardy acted as a schoolmaster, walking day by day to Heart’s Ease over a road which requires to be seen to be appreciated; he has acted, and still acts, in the capacity of lay-reader, conducting Service on Sunday, visiting the sick, burying the dead. He informed me quite seriously that he had buried over 130 persons! He is a doctor and lawyer as well as spiritual adviser, though he humbly repudiates any knowledge of medicine or acquaintance with the intricacies of the law, but as he naively puts it, they bring the sick to him or come for advice and medicine, and he prescribes to the best of his judgment. We found him most willing to forward our work in every way.”
Journals of the House of Assembly for 1860-1875 proved he was the only teacher in Random during this period. The 1860 Journal describes the opening of the first school:
“This year, I have to report a new station being occupied at Heart’s Ease, where a schoolhouse has been built and a master engaged. In the General Table will be found a return of this school. The settlement being small and the people in the habit of going into the woods in the winter season, the school can only be a humble one, but I presume the master is engaged partly for the purpose of leading religious services on Sunday in a locality that can seldom have the visits of a clergyman.”
Records suggest George taught at this school/chapel between 1859 and 1875. The exact location is unknown, but described as on a hill 100 feet above a rocky beach with a scenic view of a tombolo that can still be viewed by hikers today. The beach gave Europeans a means to dry cod for nearly 200 years before the people permanently settled the region and built the school/chapel.
During the school year, Mr. Vardy’s daily round trips to Heart’s Ease from Clay Pits would involve a six-mile trek. He was also the lay minister who kept church service on Sundays, which required additional walks to Heart’s Ease for spiritual guidance and burials.
Reverend Taylor briefly describes the hill Mr. Vardy climbed when he set out to visit the communities further “down the arm.”
“It was rather late when we reached his (George Vardy) house, so we had to be content with Evensong in his kitchen, for the church at Heart’s Ease was fully three miles off, and the road- well, it was what our Yankee friends would call “a caution.”z Had you seen this fine road before it was made, You’d lift up your hands and bless General Wade, but if you were to see this road, how it is made, you would wonder how people got up and down it, especially up it! Our Inspector of Schools has named it Break-heart Staircase, it is so marvelously steep; I suggested Break-neck Staircase as connoting the most prominent characteristic of the road.”
The earliest records of his teaching years are in a government report on education status titled “Report Upon The Inspection of Protestant Schools for the year 1865.” It records Mr. George Vardy as the teacher in a school/chapel being paid a yearly salary of 30 pounds.” He was likely employed a year earlier based on Reverend Taylor’s reference that Mr. Vardy told him he had been teaching for about 20 years. That year, he was responsible for the education of 13 boys and 16 girls, most of whom were under the age of 12 years. The average attendance was recorded at 30 students, with most children coming from nearby Fox Harbour, Gooseberry Cove and Butter Cove communities.
Mr. George Vardy passed away on January 18, 1882, three years after Reverend Taylor visited. He is buried at the now abandoned Anglican Clay Pitts cemetery, and descendants of Mr. Vardy recently had his headstone restored to mark his final resting place. In addition, two of the family surnames, Vardy and Benson, of Clay Pits, helped fund a storyboard dedicated to preserving the history of Clay Pits. The board was unveiled in the summer of 2024 during a flower service at the historical Clay Pits Cemetery, with George Vardy and other early settlers featured.
The restored headstone and storyboard pay tribute to Random’s first teacher, preacher, healer, matcher, and dispatcher.
