All Saints Anglican Church
Fortune, NL
All Saints Church is a cross-shaped church sitting on a knoll in the town of Fortune overlooking the blue waters of Fortune Bay. Built in 1961 and enlarged in 1980 it is the first and only Anglican Church to be built in this town of 1600.
The first recorded visit of an Anglican clergyman to Fortune was that of The Rev. John Harries in 1789, who had been sent to Placentia the previous year by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. However, it was the Methodist Church that was to become the dominant religious influence for years after. The census of 1857 showed Fortune to have a population of 421. Of that number there were three Anglicans, three Roman Catholics and 415 Wesleyans.
In the 1950's a fresh fish processing plant was built in Fortune. This plant needed workers and the trawlers needed crews. Soon after the people of Brunette Island resettled to Fortune and Grand Bank. Then also in the 1950's the Government of Newfoundland brought in the Resettlement Programme whereby people were paid to leave their homes in the smaller outports and move to larger communities where employment opportunities were available as well as better educational and medical services as well.
Fortune was one of the towns to which people came, manly from places on the South Coast and in Fortune Bay, and they were to greatly change the religious dynamics of the town. From 1952 the Anglican people in Fortune joined with the Anglican people in Grand bank to form a joint congregation and to build a churcn in Grand Bank to serve both towns. The Anglican Church had had a presence in Grand Bank since the early 1930's.
By 1961 the Anglican population in Fortune had increased to the point where many. including the bishop, thought that the time had come to build a church in Fortune. A meeting was held in the summer of 1961, chaired by the rector of the Parish of Lamaline, The Rev. Wilson Tibbo, to discuss the matter and the result was that a building committee was soon put in place and the wheels began to turn. The result was that the cornerstone of All Saints was laid by The Rt. Rev. John Meader, Bishop of the Diocese of Newfoundland, on All Saints Day, November 1, 1961. Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of that event.
During the 1970's a new wave of resettlement began and the Anglican population was still increasing and more places were being abandoned. The church, built less than twenty years before, soon became too small for the ever increasing congregation. In 1980 an extension was added to the existing building which almost doubled the sixe of the original church. Its one outstanding feature is the large stained-glass windows which almost completely fills the east end. It depicts the fishery of the time of Jesus up to the modern day. It has the distinction of being the first stained-glass window designed and built in Newfoundland for a church in Newfoundland by Newfoundlanders .
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