General Information:
Dildo was founded in the early 1800s due to the abundance of marine resources such as fish, whales, and seals.

The town has a fast-growing tourist industry. It offers picturesque scenery, several bed and breakfasts, the Dildo Museum interpretive centre, the Historic Dildo Days celebration in August, the First Cod Hatchery in the province on Dildo Island, and a replica of a Giant Squid caught in Dildo in 1933. Dildo won the Harrowsmith Magazine Award in 2001 as One of the Ten Prettiest Small Towns in Canada.

The town's name has attracted certain amounts of attention. The name may derive from a place name in Spain or Portugal; the name of a tree; or the shape of the headland

No one can say with any firmness when and why Dildo acquired its name, but there are plenty of theories to choose from. Some say Dildo was named after a Spanish sailor of the same name who sailed the waters of the area. Others claim Dildo Bay was named after a ship’s part, a long metal cylinder. Still, others assert that Dildo, Nfld., is named for a certain species of cactus, the Dildo-Pear Tree, found only in the Caribbean. Still others hold to the theory that Dildo was named after an archaic term for a song’s chorus. The word is used that way by Shakespeare in A Winter’s Tale, Act 4, Scene 4: “...with such delicate burdens of dildos and fadings.”

On Dildo Island archaeologists have unearthed structures and artifacts which demonstrate that the Island was occupied by at least two different peoples at different times in history:

Dorset Eskimo - 2000 to 1100 years ago
Recent Indians (Ancestors of the Beothuks) - 900 years ago


Dorset Eskimo:
Between about AD 100 and AD 750 Newfoundland was occupied by Dorset Eskimo people who arrived from the Arctic. One of the sites that the Dorset people inhabited was Dildo Island.
Archaeologist Silve Leblanc uncovered the remains of two Dorset houses and over 5500 artifacts. The remnants of these houses can be seen on the island today. Radiocarbon samples recovered from these houses indicate that they were occupied from about AD 150 to AD 750

Recent Indians:
The remnants of a wigwam and hearth were found that were clearly part of an Indian camp. It has been determined that the people who established the camp were an earlier people than the Beothuks. A radiocarbon sample recovered from the fireplace produced a date range of between AD 720 and AD 960, at least 653 years before the Cupids colonists reported seeing Beothuks. In addition, these people made almost all of their tools from purple and blue rhyolites that came from a source in Bonavista Bay roughly 90 miles to the north. While the Beothuk people living at Russell's Point made most of their stone tools from a gray chert which seems to have come from somewhere in Trinity Bay. Archaeologist call these people Recent Indians and believe that they must have arrived in Trinity Bay from Bonavista Bay bringing the stone so essential for their survival with them. It is believed that they arrived shortly after the Dorset Eskimo left.