Part Seven
The Markland Experiment Ends

Even with these problems, the land settlement project grew. In September, 1936, 25 new families were settled at Haricot, 12 miles south of Markland. New settlements were also started at Brown's Arm near Lewisporte, at Lourdes on the Port au Port Peninsula, and at Midland near Deer Lake. But the land settlement program was not working. When Markland was started in 1934, the trustees were sure that families could become self-supporting. They believed it would cost between $600 to $800 to get each family started. After that, the families would not need any government help. In fact, they hoped people would be able to repay all the money that was spent to set them up.

This never happened. By 1937, the government began to cut back. At its peak, Markland had supported 210 families. By 1937, the number of families at Markland (including Haricot) was 136. That year, the number fell to 94. Some of the people who left were miners from Bell Island who went back to the mines when they could get jobs. The people who stayed in Markland were worried. They did not own the houses they lived in. They did not own the land they farmed. They never saw cash and everything they took from the community store got them deeper into debt. No one knew how the debts were to be paid off, or when they would own their houses and land.

In 1937, an unnamed government official who visited Markland wrote that all of the settlers in Markland were "keen to know when they are going to get rights on their houses and surrounding land. They want to be told plainly how and when they can clear their debts and how and when they can get possession of sufficient cleared land to give them a fair prospect of maintaining themselves on the land."

Thomas Lodge continued to believe that land settlement was a good idea. He thought the government was making a mistake by cutting back on the Markland project. Later, he wrote that it cost just as much to keep the smaller number of families on the land. He said,

Anyone who drove through the Markland settlement in August 1938 could have seen for himself that settlers were working on their land, that somehow or other land had been cleared and was bearing good crops...He would have seen that some steads were better worked than others, some houses tidier than others, some crops better than others. In other words, he would have appreciated that ordinary human beings were involved. If he had been able to contrast what he saw at Markland with what he could have seen at say Upper Island Cove, 30 miles away, there could have been left in his mind no shred of a doubt that this was a project worthy of encouragement. It might require a year more or less, two or three acres more or less, before complete independence would be attained.¹²