Some Oldtimers: Story-Telling with Johnny Stride
Source: Vol. 10, No. 5, October 1981, pp. 21

... Another old-timer that John Stride likes to remember is Ephriam Rowsell, local fur-buyer from
about 1880 to 1920. Eph Rowsell would travel to the various settlements in the Bay each
February to buy furs, relay news, and get into long conversations. "One night in Charles' Brook,"
explains Johnny, "there was John Hutchings, Danny Decker, and Skipper George Perry all got
together when Eph Rowsell arrived, and they talked about the Bible all night long. They were
sitting around the wood stove smoking Home Rule tobacco. It was a Waterloo Number Three
stove with a rim around it, and by four in the morning, they had the top of that stove filled right
level with matches from lighting their clay pipes. After they had had a couple of hours sleep, Eph
packed up his furs to head across the Bay to Uncle Bobby Porter's house. Just after he left,
Danny Decker remembered some point he had forgot to bring up in the discussion the night
before, so he put on his snowshoes and caught up to Eph Rowsell out the tickle just to have the
last word. That's the kind of fella they were in them days!
     "Once when I was going on the spring drive, about 1927 or '28, I went over to Point
Leamington to visit Eph Rowsell and court a girl there at the same time. We were sitting in the
kitchen and the girls were singing a new Pentecostal hymn, singing right loud. I could see that
Eph, who was about 80 years old, was getting angry. Suddenly he ups with the big size 13 boot
and stamps down on the floor, letting out a big roar, 'I wants to be talkin,' he says, and puts the
run on the women. He wanted to talk to me and find out how many of the old guys had survived
the winter, and how they were doing."
[ Note: Johnny Stride lived in Phillips Head]


Point Leamington
Source: Vol. 10, No. 5, October 1981, p. 10

     In 1912 James P. Howley recounted a story of one man named Rowsell who was killed by
Beothuk Indians at New Bay.
     Mrs. Violet Baggs of Point Leamington, however, maintains there were two Rowsells,
brothers Thomas and Joseph, who were early settlers at Point Leamington and of whom she is a
direct descendant. The two men regularly visited an area near the millstream at Point Leamington
where they dammed the river and caught salmon.
     Thomas became a lifelong friend of the Beothuks who came to the area in the summer to
catch salmon and otter, and he often gave the Indians salmon directly from his capture dam or his
cutting table. 
     His brother Joseph was a sworn enemy of the Beothuks and often unloaded his rifle in
their direction to prove it. Howley reported that the Indians had no love for Rowsell and they
finally ambushed him.
     Violet Baggs maintains that the murder of Joseph Rowsell in fact took place at the
millstream in Point Leamington where the Indians shot Rowsell full of arrows and later stuck his
head on a pole, as was their custom. She feels that the Indians sought revenge on him because one
of them had been accidentally killed while playing with a gun on board Rowsell's vessel which
they had been raiding.