An Eerie Visit to Placentia and Argentia

A friend and I discover the military past and the industrial past on Placentia Bay |

Sources

› “Argentia,” Wikipedia, updated September 3, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentia. | 

› Boskalis, “Equipment Sheet: Triumph: Semi-Submersible Heavy Transport Vessel,” Boskalis.com, https://boskalis.com/media/3p4noap4/triumph.pdf (viewed June 24, 2025). | 

› Dale Jarvis, Place Names of Newfoundland and Labrador, Flanker Press, 2022. | 

› Alan Rayburn, Dictionary of Canadian Place Names, Oxford, 1997. |

› Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population: Census Profile: Newfoundland and Labrador, modified August 2, 2024, https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/dp-pd/prof/search-recherche/lst/results-resultats.cfm?Lang=E&GEOCODE=10#resgeo. | 

 › Troy Turner, “Residents of ‘Canada's Smallest Town’ Are Moving Out,” CBC News, May 19, 2025, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/residents-of-canada-s-smallest-town-are-moving-out-1.7537408. | 

› Wayne Jones, Photos of Placentia and Argentia, https://photos.app.goo.gl/RAPjejY7Cb4mL2BH6 | 

Transcript

Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Newfoundland Boy, a podcast about the Canadian province of Newfoundland. This is episode 35: “An Eerie Visit to Placentia and Argentia.”

One of the things I try to do since I moved back to my home province about a year and a half ago now is explore the many varied communities, most of them small towns, that are scattered all across the island, mostly but not entirely along the shore, the perimeter. And they are varied. Just to put things into perspective, and using population as the metric, Newfoundland has communities that range in population from 215,000 people to, until last month, just 4 people. Yes, that’s right, 4, not 40 or 400.

The large number is St. John’s, the capital of the province, and the city I live in. The small number is, or was, Tilt Cove, which had the smallest population of any city in Canada. The residents are all moving to King’s Point (population: 650), less than a two-hour drive southwest.

Newfoundland has only three cities: St. John’s, Mount Pearl (population: 22,000), and Corner Brook, where I was born (population: 19,000). These three cities together have nearly half the population of the entire province. The rest of the population, as I mentioned, are in small towns.

One of those towns is Placentia, located on the most easterly and biggest peninsula in the province, the Avalon. Placentia itself is on the southeast side of the peninsula, about an hour-and-a-half drive south and east of St. John’s (which is also on the Avalon Peninsula). Placentia has a long history in Newfoundland. There is a Basque (Spanish) burial ground there and the name and spelling Placentia dates back to as early as 1563 (a year before Shakespeare was born!). It went through a few name changes over the years as France and others took over the town. It’s been called Placentia since 1713, when it became British territory with the Treaty of Utrecht.

My friend Gwen and I did a day trip by car there last week. It’s a classic small Newfoundland town, very pretty in some places, a little grim in others. The current population is just over 3,000. We arrived about lunch time and so we drove around both exploring the town and looking for a place to eat. I happened to spot something that’s unfortunately a bit of a rarity even in bigger places in Newfoundland, and that’s a foodtruck that sells “street meat,” that is, large hotdogs and especially sausages of various kinds. I could really go for an Italian sausage with mustard and sauerkraut. What I got was a nice snack, but just a small sausage, and I had to make do with ketchup, mustard, and relish. Yes, I know, this is a first-world problem.

We drove around a bit more and came across the Dockside Pub, which not only didn’t look that inviting but was closed, either permanently or just not open yet for the day, we couldn’t tell. So we ended up having lunch at what is often a staple in towns and cities of all sizes in Newfoundland, a Chinese restaurant (this one is called the Hoi Pun). Or what you might call more accurately, a Canadian Chinese restaurant: the menu included those chicken balls with the nuclear red sauce, but also hamburgers. Don’t get me wrong: I love these places. Gwen chose a dish that she liked, but I chose one that I didn’t like that much.

There was nothing that eerie about Placentia itself, but the former town of Argentia next to it was something to see. Although it’s no longer an official town and is just a “commercial seaport and industrial park” that’s part of Placentia, Argentia has an interesting background. As is frequent in Newfoundland history, it was first settled by one nation and then ultimately by the British. In this case, it was French settlers in the late 17th century, but then also claimed as British territory in 1713. They retained and translated the French name as Little Placentia, but that was changed to Argentia in 1901 after the discovery of silver ore nearby (the Latin word for silver is argentum).

Argentia also played a role in the Second World War when the United States established a base there, and that American presence remained well after the war was over. The base was not closed until 1994 (in the past as in the present, the United States likes to have a foothold wherever it can internationally). No word on whether they were pushing to annex Newfoundland as the 51st state.

What’s left of Argentia now is a sight to see, and not all in the good sense. As we drove around the various roads and vast expanses of pavement, like unoccupied parking lots, we saw some things, some objects, some buildings, that we are still at a loss to explain. There is a huge rusty white dome-like container, with run-off holes in it as if it used to hold a liquid of some kind. A marker at one spot on the side reads:

 ——    +250

 ————    0

 ——    –250

In another corner of a fenced-in area, there’s a rusty chain in a pile, and with links a good metre (yard) long. Elsewhere there’s a large pile of, again rusty, metal that looks like something you might see in a scrapyard, but it didn’t seem to be recently touched. That’s in contrast to the quarry, which seemed to have fresh piles of gravel.

Perhaps the oddest things we saw looked like giant missiles, some of them on their sides like large bowling pins. They have a yellow band at the top, white in the middle, and rust at the bottom. I’d say they were about 40 metres long (about 130 feet). Even a little creepier was a longer, silver, more modern-looking one. I’d say it was twice the length of the old ones, and it was also constructed differently. The old ones had the tips taken off but the new silver one had a red tip. There wasn’t much (or any) security personnel as far as we could see, and one pickup truck that we met just drove on by us without a look.

The odd feel of the place is probably due to the fact that in some sense it’s a kind of graveyard, a place where objects have just been abandoned. The industrial equivalent of a once-busy street that now has boarded-up windows. On the other hand, it’s a functioning commercial area, and with a dock as well. There was a ship in port, a model called Triumph owned by a company called Boskalis, B-O-S-K-A-L-I-S, in the Netherlands. A pamphlet online from the company shows a photo of the ship carrying those exact white and yellow missile things.

All in all, a fascinating trip. And if you want to see any of the photos I took, check out the link in the show notes.

That’s all for this episode. Thanks for listening. And please join me again next Saturday.