Soo Mining

No-one would argue that Sault Ste. Marie isn't in a rural part of North Ontario - you can look around the city and the surrounding ones and constantly be reminded of the wilderness around us. An area like that brings about certain industries, and one of those is the history of mining the Algoma District has had since back before it was even called the Algoma District.

The first sign of mining being a possibility in Algoma was found by Etienne Brule, one of the Europeans to explore Canada. On Michipicoten Island in Lake Superior he claimed to have found a copper mine built by the natives, bringing back an ingot as proof. While obviously small-scale and more for practical use, this was evidence there were precious metals in the area.

It would take some time before mining in Algoma would become a genuine business, however. There is some evidence that Europeans attempted to mine around Lake Superior in the 1700s, but in a short-lived endeavor, possibly due to technology not having advanced yet or simply finding an inefficient vein. The first true commercial mine in Algoma began in the next century, when copper was discovered in Bruce Mines.

This is indeed the very same Bruce Mines that still stands today, which first began life as a town for miners working at the copper mine there. Erected in 1846, it was named after James Bruce, the Governor General of Canada who was elected that same year. At its peak, Bruce Mines employed 350 people from England and Wales to tap the copper veins, and by 1871 the amount of people living there totalled 1,300, the largest of any settlement in Canada at the time. Bruce Mines itself would only last until the beginning of the 1900s, when falling value of copper and the area running dry of it forced a closure.

By this point, some other notable mines in the Algoma area had been discovered. In the late 1800s prospectors searching for iron located a rich vein of it around Wawa that came to be known as the Helen Mine. It produced two and a half million tons of hematite iron ore, the largest production recorded in Canada in 1929, and would last for nearly a century until its closure in 1998. There was also the Grace Gold Mine at Michipicoten, which in its heyday generated profits of $1,500 to $1,800 a month, a tidy sum back then.

One later discovery of metal in the region came in 1948, when prospector Robert Campbell discovered a deposit of Uranium at Theano Point, seventy miles north of the Soo. While it never became used commercially, this find attracted quite a bit of attention due to it being the first time Uranium had been found in Canada. This caused a wave of tourism from other prospectors and geologists, which in turn resulted in a much larger vein of Uranium being found near Elliot Lake. This caused a major boom period where twelve mines came into being around that area, which lasted until around the beginning of the 2000s.

It has to be said that while these mines certainly represented progress, it wasn't all good news, as mining was dangerous work that could leave you disabled or take years off your lifespan. Even the Elliot Lake mines, which in theory were the newest and most advanced, ended in many of the miners contracting lung cancer due to the Radon Gas they were exposed to at the time, with one commenting they were misled about how dangerous the job actually was. Mining is certainly an important part of Algoma, but it is also important to remember the individual people who took these risks in order to develop the area.

This article uses information sourced from Sault History Online and Bruce Mines's official website. Full credit is given to both.