Mother-in-Law Doors

SHOW NOTES 

On a trip to visit my mother’s home town, I noticed changes in the communities along the way, including in their mother-in-law doors

Sources

◘ Dictionary of Newfoundland English, 2nd edition with supplement, edited by G.M. Story, W.J. Kirwin, and J.D.A. Widdowson, Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage, 2025, https://www.heritage.nf.ca/dictionary/ ◘ 

◘ The Flanker Dictionary of Newfoundland English, edited by Garry Cranford,  Flanker Press, 2018 ◘ 

◘ Kurt Kohlstedt, “Doors to Nowhere: Elevated Front Entries in Newfoundland Raise Questions,” 99% Invisible, April 4, 2021, https://99percentinvisible.org/article/doors-to-nowhere-elevated-front-entries-in-newfoundland-raise-questions/ ◘ 

◘ Nora Reid, “Report on 28 - 30 Young Street, Welland: ‘The Morwood House,”  Welland Local Architectural Conservation Advisory Committee, January 1, 1990, https://www.welland.ca/Heritage/reports/MorwoodHouse.pdf ◘  

◘ “Roamin’ Round,” The Western Star, May 22, 1970, page 4, https://dai.mun.ca/PDFs/westernstar/WesternStar19700523.pdf ◘ 

◘ “Roamin’ Round,” The Western Star, September 9, 1972, page 4, https://collections.mun.ca/digital/collection/westernstar/id/117152/rec/2 ◘  

Transcript

I visited my mother, who’s 87, last week in the care home in Corner Brook where she now lives. During the visit we carried out a frequent ritual during these visits: we visited the gravesites of her parents and her maternal grandfather in the Anglican cemetery in Cox’s Cove, the small community on the north shore of the Bay of Islands, across the bay from Corner Brook, as they say, and about 40 km away by a squiggly road that is mostly in good condition.

When I was growing up, there were five communities along the way: Irishtown, Summerside, Meadows, Gillams, and McIvers, but Irishtown and Summerside have since merged into a single town in 1991. It’s mostly a very pretty drive en route to Cox’s Cove and in many spots you are riding right along the bay and even slightly elevated so that you have an excellent view of it.

One of the main things that both my mother and I noticed on the trip was that all the communities except for Cox’s Cove not only had well-kept-up or renovated houses, at least from what we could see from the outside, but that there were even some new ones. And virtually all of them, if not literally all of them, no longer had their mother-in-law doors. There were none that we saw in Cox’s Cove either, and it’s a mystery to me why the community hasn’t developed as much over the last fifty years, because it also has some spectacular views of the Bay of Islands as well.

A mother-in-law door is not a special exalted entrance for the mother of your spouse, but rather the word in Newfoundland English for what these houses had in the 1970s when we made that same trip. There wasn’t as much money in those communities in those days and so the people did the best they could afford. Many of the houses lacked siding and so the innards of parts of them were exposed. Some were in disrepair. And many of them had mother-in-law doors.

These were the front doors of the houses and since the houses were often built on a hillside facing the bay, below that front door there was a basement or another level of the house. The joke of course is that after a visit to the house by family members, you’d ask your mother-in-law to exit by this special door. The logic of the joke is bolstered by the fact that in many Newfoundland houses, even those on level ground, it’s commonplace to enter by the back door. So this offer from the son- or daughter-in-law would seem like special treatment. Everyone though was in on the joke, to the extent that it wasn’t even a joke any more, and it would be commonly known that this was a door that was never used. In some cases, the families would have a couch along it on the inside, treating it just like a part of the wall, and nobody would see anything strange in that.

I think the idea of the mother-in-law door in the first place was to give a normal look to the front of the house, but also to plan for the day when you could finally afford to build steps leading up to the door, and perhaps even start using it as your main entrance. I’ve been in at least one house that’s like that now. There’s a back entrance, but there’s also a door on the main level above the small apartment (the nanny flat, as it’s called), pretty high up, but now there are steps installed leading up to it. And the inside of the house is designed so that this is the normal entrance: when you enter you don’t step right into the living room with a coffee table on your right and the TV on your left, but rather into an entrance area where you can hang your coat and take off your shoes.

As for the word itself, it doesn’t appear in the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, which was first published in 1982 but was mostly compiled during the 1960s and 1970s. There are lots of articles and sites about these doors now though, starting from about the early 2000s and continuing to the present day, but the earliest original use I could find for mother-in-law door was in the Western Star newspaper in 1970, published in Corner Brook, where the editor of the “Roamin’ Round” column reports:

“Mother-in-law” is the name given to that Newfoundland custom of building front doors without steps leading up to them. They get their name from the fact that it might be the way you would invite your mother-in-law to enter and request that she leave the same way. Most of them are several feet above the ground. Last year we discovered no fewer than 50 along the main road from one end of Corner Brook to the other.

The doors were a bit of an obsession with the Roamer, who reports a couple of years later the happy news that a man in Deer Lake has finally built steps, but “that leaves only 500 more homes in this area without them.”

By the way, in passing, the practice of building doors like this—calling them either mother-in-law doors or suicide doors—seems not to be unique to Newfoundland. I found a report about a house in Welland, Ontario, which says they were common in the province in the 1850s. And for a practical reason: “due to a change in tax law … the upper porch was deliberately unfinished as the owner was not required to pay taxes until the house was completed.”

Apart from financial, there are some historical theories for the building of mother-in-law doors in Newfoundland as well. When Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, it had to comply with the Canadian fire code, which stipulated two means of egress. And so, “following the letter of the law, the theory goes, a door was added, but no stairs, since technically that was not included in the legal requirement.” Another theory, this one a little dubious, is that since many Newfoundland communities get so much snow, you could install a door without steps and so easily make your way out once the snow reached about the level of the main floor.

And so my mother and I returned to Corner Brook. We had lunch on the way back and had to climb some steep stairs to get to the door. I suppose it was good that there were any stairs at all.