History
Fishing firms from England and Wales arrived at what is now Northern Bay as early as the mid-18th century.
By 1768, immigrants from England and Ireland had settled the "North Shore" of Conception Bay, including Northern Bay.
On September 17, 1775, a ship carrying 400 passengers crashed somewhere near
present-day Northern Bay.
The crash was undoubtedly the result of the Newfoundland Hurricane of 1775 which remains one of the worst - if not the worst - natural disasters to have hit Newfoundland and Labrador in history.
Folklore
Myths, legends and folklore were once very important in rural Newfoundland, but today are little more than entertainment.
One folk tale that continues in the culture of Northern Bay and the surrounding communities is that of "Hannah's Tolt". The following is from the old Newfoundland magazine Decks Wash (V.9, No.6, Dec.1980):
"The local word for a rocky hill is 'tolt' and there is an interesting story surrounding the origin of Hannah's Tolt, located inland from Northern Bay near Welsh's Pond. It occurred probably in the 1920s [or] 1930s. Late in the fall of the year when a crowd of women were in the woods berry-picking, Hannah Milley and her daughter must have been separated from the main group of women when a snowstorm suddenly broke out. They never made it back to the community.
Search parties failed to turn up the bodies, but about 17 years later, a man named Lewis Crummey was in the woods partridge hunting and he found the two bodies and their rusted berry buckets down at the base of a tolt, which was then nicknamed Hannah's Tolt."
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