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Tilton student named top heritage winner on the Avalon

Luke Crane, a Grade 4 student at Holy Redeemer Elementary in Spaniard’s Bay was the Avalon regional winner in Heritage NL’s annual poster contest to celebrate National Heritage Week, which started February 21. Crane is shown here with his teacher TerriLynn Morrissey. Crane’s artwork was titled ‘The American Man.’

“I have visited ‘The American Man’ many times,” Luke wrote in his accompanying essay. “It is in Tilton. In the 1900s people from my town and other towns built three towers of rocks to help guide them when it was snowing. These rocks were called ‘The American Man.’ Only one is still there today. It is important to me because my dad told me stories about my great pop and my pop going up over Spider Pond to cut wood for their houses. They used these rocks to know where they were when it got stormy.”

Luke went on to explain that fishermen from his area first saw these types of rocks when they were fishing on the Labrador and figured they had been placed there by Americans, hence the name for the rock towers they built when they came home.

“Lots of people pulled their wood with horses,” Luke noted. “My pop’s horse was called Pony.”

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