Our People, Their Stories

Greenspond has been, and still is, home to some incredible people with amazing stories. Our goal is to present some of these stories and provide biographical sketches for these wonderful individuals.

Greenspond People

Greenspond Merchants

Newfoundland and Labrador’s outport economy depended not on cash, but on merchant credit. Each fall, fishers traded their annual harvest of salt-cod to local merchants for clothes, food, fishing gear, and other supplies from their stores. Fishers often received these goods earlier in the year on credit, but did not know the price at which they purchased them. Merchants set the price for goods taken on credit at the end of the fishing season, balancing the prices of goods against the prices merchants would get for fish in international markets. Such price manipulations maximized the opportunity for merchants to profit from the fish trade, but left their clients with the prospect of simply breaking even or falling into deeper debt each season. (The Truck System by Jenny Higgins, 2007).

Some of the merchants and business people who had regular dealings in Greenspond:

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