J.R. Smallwood and his government had to make choices. How and where would they spend money? Would they put services in very small places where people had to struggle to make a living? Or would they try to get those people to move to bigger places?

We can imagine a small fishing community at that time. People were waiting for things to get better. Some felt they had waited long enough.

Bragg's Island, 1955

We can learn more about this time in our history by looking at letters and reports. In the archives of the Centre for Newfoundland Studies at Memorial University, there are boxes of such letters and reports. We can read what people who worked for the government reported back to St. John's from all over the province. We can read the replies made by J.R. Smallwood and others in his government. By doing this, we can piece together the stories of small places. We can begin to see how resettlement came about.

In March of 1955, R.N. Belbin, the welfare officer in Glovertown, wrote to the government in St. John's about what was happening on Bragg's Island.⁴ People were asking for help to move to the mainland. Some people had already left; others were planning to go.

The winter on Bragg's Island had been a hard one. In the fall of 1954, the main merchant on the island left. That winter, people found it hard to get food and other things they needed. There had also been a problem getting teachers. There was one on Bragg's Island, a young man from the community out for his first year of teaching. But one teacher wasn't enough. It was hard to get teachers to go to small, isolated places. In those days, there were more jobs than teachers. That year on Bragg's Island, 30 children could not go to school because there was no one to teach them.