Orange Order in Newfoundland: History and Orangemen's Day

Elinor Senior’s study of the Orange Order in Newfoundland, cited by the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, traces its origin to 1863. By 1873 Orangemen played a significant part in elections, and a deadly clash at Harbour Grace in December 1883 reshaped colonial politics. Orangemen’s Day is still a paid holiday for provincial government employees: Monday, 13 July in 2026.

The record has more politics than parades. In 1885 Orangemen helped break the premier’s alliance with the Catholic Liberals, and the lodge halls built between 1875 and 1908 now stand on heritage registers.

When did the Orange Order come to Newfoundland?

The usual date is 1863. That is the first year in the title of Elinor Kyte Senior’s 1959 Memorial University master’s thesis, The origin and political activities of the Orange Order in Newfoundland, 1863-1890, which the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB) cites in its entries for Kent, McNeily, Shea and Winter. The DCB entries themselves supply the people. Alexander McNeily, later a speaker of the assembly, was an officer of the first St. John’s lodge and was eventually elected grand master in Newfoundland. By 1873 James Spearman Winter, a St. John’s lawyer, was master of Royal Oak Lodge in St. John’s, and he served as provincial grand master from 1878 to 1885. The DCB also says that after the 1869 election a group of younger men in Frederic Carter’s Conservative party, McNeily and William Whiteway among them, began to raise Fenian and sectarian scares and to cultivate links with the Order.

Lodge numbers hint at the order of arrival. Residents of Middle Bight at Kelligrews walked to Portugal Cove in the 1870s for Lodge Derry 8 before building their own hall, Prince of Orange 23, in 1875. Heart and Hand 9 stands at Green’s Harbour, and Waterloo 18 at New Perlican.

How big was the Order in Newfoundland?

Big enough to rival Ulster, if Heritage NL is right. Its register entry for the Bonavista lodge, L.O.L. 4, says the lodge had 475 members in the early twentieth century, the largest membership of any Orange lodge in North America, and that Newfoundland’s Orange membership rivalled that of counties in Ulster. A local history of Bell Island records a parade of 500 in 1911 and 400 in 1933, and a lodge that supplied Christmas dinners to 56 families in 1931. Heritage NL dates the rapid decline to the 1960s, and the national overview tells the Canadian side of that story.

A dated timeline of the Order in Newfoundland

What happened at Harbour Grace in 1883?

Orangemen and Catholics clashed, and the colony’s politics split along religious lines. This site’s event page describes an Orange parade meeting a blocking crowd in December 1883, and the DCB calls it an Orange-Catholic affray. The DCB’s own entries disagree on the toll: the entry for Whiteway says nineteen Catholics were charged with the murder of four Orangemen, and the entry for Robert John Kent says five persons were killed. The event page’s sources give seventeen injured.

Whiteway, the premier, and Winter acted as Crown prosecutors. Two trials ended in acquittals, which destroyed the Conservative-Liberal coalition, according to the DCB. The political committee the Orange order formed in 1883, dominated by McNeily, then allied with the New party, and in February 1885 Orangemen and New party members combined to break Whiteway’s alliance with the Catholic Liberals. Thorburn’s Reform party won the autumn election after a campaign the DCB calls virulently sectarian.

Is Orangemen’s Day a holiday in Newfoundland and Labrador?

Yes, for provincial government employees. The Treasury Board Secretariat’s holiday policy says employees are entitled to be paid for 14 designated holidays a year, lists Orangemen’s Day among them, and applies to all employees of government departments. Its 2026 schedule puts Orangeman’s Day on Monday, 13 July. Whether the Labour Standards Act requires private employers to give the day is a separate question, and the Orangemen’s Day page reports that the Act’s list of paid public holidays leaves it out.

Bell Island’s local history describes parades led by a rider as King Billy on a white horse, and says Orangemen’s Day is observed in Newfoundland as a provincial holiday, though not a statutory one, on the nearest Monday.

Which Orange halls still stand in Newfoundland?

Several, and the heritage registers have recorded them. Bonavista’s L.O.L. 4 was built about 1907 by Ronald Strathie and designated a Registered Heritage Structure in 1997. Lord Nelson L.O.L. 149 at Woody Point, in Gros Morne National Park, was designated in 1998, and the register’s text gives its construction as 1908. Prince of Orange L.O.L. 23 at Kelligrews, in Conception Bay South, was designated a municipal heritage building in 1999.

The Order’s other bodies had Newfoundland branches too. The Bell Island history names a Ladies’ Orange Benevolent Association formed in 1915, the Orange Young Britons’ Prince of Wales Lodge, organized in June 1919, and Royal Black Preceptory Wabana Chapter 1249, in which one member reached the eleventh degree in 1958. The Royal Black Preceptory page explains that senior body. In Ontario the Order built an institution of its own, the Loyal True Blue and Orange Home at Richmond Hill, which opened in 1923.