Tradition holds that the discovery of St. John's occurred when Italian explorer Giovanni Cabotto, [better known by his English name John Cabot], first entered the harbor on June 24 1497, on the feast day of St. John the Baptist. With a population today approaching 150,000, St. John's lies in a tremendously beautiful site around the Avalon Peninsula on the eastern tip of Newfoundland. The city itself is built around a very well protected harbour which empties out into the Atlantic Ocean through the 'Narrows', a narrow channel of water surrounded by high peaks of rock on either side. European fishermen were moving to the future St. John's area and using this port to shelter and as far back as the 1520's, but permanent structures were only erected after Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed in and took possession of the island in 1583 for Queen Elizabeth I.
Unfortunately, a fairly violent early history has left few traces of North America's earliest urban settlement. In 1689 a small garrison of soldiers was moved to St. John's and Fort William was constructed, near the site of the present Hotel Newfoundland. The town slowly grew as a result of its fishing heritage, and until the late 19th century almost all of the construction within the town was still timber built. These unfortunate facts lead to a great fire of 1892 which destroyed more than two thirds of the city's buildings, and left roughly 10,000 people homeless. Afterward, the people in St. John's began constructing with stone to prevent such occurrences from reappearing.
The waves of Irish fishermen who have moved to St. John's for employment have left an indelible stamp on both the architecture and linguistics of the city. Anyone who has ever moved to St. John's will immediately be struck by the strong Irish inflections of the local English. This is a holdover from the fact that many of its original inhabitants were from both western and southeastern Ireland, including Galway, Waterford, Wexford and Kilkenny. Today the city is a mixture of Victorian English and Irish architecture, with a lively arts scene and a relaxed pace of living.
Culturally, moving to St. John's will allow you to visit such museums as the James O'Mara Pharmacy Museum, the Lillian Stevenson Nursing Museum, the Blackhead Chapel Museum, and the Newfoundland Museum, with its displays of the natural history and native population’s history of the province.
Economically, the provincial government and Crown corporations are the largest employers in St. John's. The city’s major private sector employers include: IPSCO [western Canada's largest steel manufacturer], AgrEvo Inc. [agricultural chemicals] Degelman Industries [agricultural implement manufacturing], the New Brunswick Wheat Pool, [world's largest grain handling cooperative], Crown Life Insurance, Sears Canada, and the Royal Bank of Canada [RBC].
