A close-up view of one of the two original Labrador Development Company Ltd. houses still standing in Port Hope Simpson; 24 July 2002. Only six so called "Company Houses" were ever built. They were kept solely for the use of the Company's staff and their visitors whilst a maximum of only 26 houses were ever bult by the loggers themselves for their families on the basis that they were allowed to purchase timber from the Company and then have to pay a rent on top! Some such houses were quite understandably left standing by the loggers as sidewalls without a roof. Most of the families chose to build for themselves away from the Company on the other side of Blackwater Brook.
In his original application to the Colonial Development Fund in London, John Osborne Williams applied for a loan on the written basis that 400 houses would be built and Sir John Hope Simpson later actively supported him in his false intentions. For example, on 4 June 1935, Simpson wrote to The Dominions Office, in a letter marked secret and personal, that 200 families were being settled at the Alexis River site. This when coupled with the Company's glossy brochure published in Cardiff in 1935 meant that Williams and Simpson were using evidence in a misleading way to paint a dishonest picture about what was really going on in Port Hope Simpson at that time. On 7 January 1935 the Governor of Newfoundland wrote that he anticipated that 400 houses would be built. The loggers and their families, who came with dreams of prosperity and happiness; the Commission of Government based in St. John's and The Dominions Office in London as well as the whole of the British Government (who didn't liase very well between its Departments) were all in fact duped by J.O. Williams and Sir J.H. Simpson into thinking that a good type of development was going on at the site. Nothing could have been further from the truth.