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• Founding of New Liskeard
  The Little Clay Belt, the rich agricultural belt extending north from New Liskeard, was originally inhabited by the Algonquin First Nations, including Joachim "Clear Sky" Wabigijic and Angela Lapointe who lived by the mouth of the Wabi River. In 1891, William Murray and Irvin Heard settled here and two years later Crown Lands Agent John Armstrong arrived to supervise development. The abundance of good, inexpensive farmland attracted people from southern to "new" Ontario and the...

• Timiskaming Mission, The
  In 1836, a Catholic mission was established directly across the lake at Fort Timiskaming, a Hudson's Bay Company post where, by 1842, a chapel had been completed. The mission was moved to this site in 1836 and a presbytery was constructed by the Oblates who had commenced missionary work in the region in 1844. A second presbytery was built here in 1867.The Grey Sisters of Ottawa, who had arrived the previous year, then established the...

• Kirkland Lake Gold Camp, The
  The Larder Lake gold rush of 1906 was accompanied by discoveries of gold at Swastika and, in 1911, the first strike at Kirkland Lake was made by William H. Wright. The Tough-Oakes became the camp's first producing gold mine in 1912. During the peak years of the late 1930's the Lake Shore, Wright-Hargreaves, Teck-Hughes, Sylvanite, Kirkland Lake Gold, and Macassa mines along the "Main Break", and other properties in the vicinity, employed about 5,000 men...

• Great Fire of 1922, The
  On October 4, 1922, scattered bush fires which had been burning for some days north of Haileybury were united by strong winds into a holocaust which spread over most of 18 townships and took an estimated 43 lives. Burning out of control between the Englchart and Cobalt areas, it destroyed the communities of North Cobalt, Charlton, Thornloe and Heaslip, while Englehart and New Liskeard were partly consumed. The thriving town of Haileybury was razed except...

• Arctic Watershed, The
  The height of land known as the Arctic Watershed crosses Highway 11 at this point. North of here, water drains into Hudson Bay; rivers, lakes and streams to the south flow into the Great Lakes. As the northern wilderness came under development, the erratic line of the watershed defined territorial boundaries. It marked the southern limit of Rupert's Land, the vast territory granted to the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670. Two centuries later, it formed the northern boundary of lands ceded to the Crown by the First Nation Ojibwa in the Robinson-Superior Treaties of 1850.

• Founding of Englehart
  Englehart owes its beginnings to the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway (T. & N.O.), a colonization line designed by the provincial government to open agricultural lands of the Little Clay Belt to settlement and to provide access to the area's vast timber resources. In 1905 the railway stockpiled equipment and materials on the east bank of the Blanche (now Englehart) River, at mile 138, for the line's first major bridge. This drew entrepreneurs to provide...

• Cobalt Mining Camp
  About 900 yards southwest of here, on August 7, 1903, two lumbermen seeking timber for railroad ties made the initial discovery of the cobalt silver camp. Named for its discoverers, the McKinley-Darrach mine operated from 1904-1927. In the rush of 1905-06, Coleman township became the scene of the most intensive prospecting hitherto known in Ontario. Though it once boasted over 100 producing mines, the fortunes of the camp waned after 1920, owing to sharply reduced...

• Ferguson Highway, The
  In 1925 the Ontario government began construction of this 260-mile trunk-road between Cochran and North Bay. The road was intended to link the rapidly developing mining and agricultural communities of "New Ontario" with the province's southern regions. Several sections of rebuilt local roads were incorporated into dense Timagami forest. The highway was officially opened on July 2, 1927, and named in honour of the Hon. G. Howard Ferguson, Premier of Ontario(1923-30) and long-time promoter of...

• William Henry Drummond 1854-1907
  Physician and poet, William Henry Drummond was born in Ireland in 1854, and came to Canada with his parents about ten years later. In 1884 he graduated in medicine from Bishop's College, Lennoxville, serving in rural Quebec before establishing a practice in Montreal. The "Poet of the Habitant", Drummond wrote in the broken English of the French-Canadian farmer and woodsman. His poems, published between 1867 – 1908, were characterized by humour and pathos. They touch...

• Founding of the Town of Latchford
  Latchford began in 1903 as Montreal River Station, a town site and river crossing for the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway, the colonization line designed to open the Little Clay Belt to settlement and provide access to the area's vast timber resources. In 1904, a three span iron bridge was built to carry the railway across the Montreal River and construction of a station house and water tank soon followed. The town was surveyed in...