To Timmins Museum director-curator Karen Bachmann, there are few things more iconic in this city’s history than the Hollinger houses.
“We see them still,” she says. “They’ve all been renovated. We have one in the lot at the museum.
Shortly after Noah Timmins started the mine in 1910, he realized he needed housing to attract workers, and bought land near the mine.
“So he started to build some of the housing up on the Hill District on Take St. for his salaried employees – superintendents, the mining engineers, those guys. They start to create a couple of streets, so they clear out Spruce, Pine, Cedar and Balsam and name them at that point for, of course, all the trees that were there.”
In 1919, Timmins decided on the area near Mountjoy Street for housing for miners and their families..
“So Mountjoy, Vimy, Cambrai, Messines Avenues, Borden St., those start to open up,” Bachmann recounts, “and they build 150 little flat-topped four-room homes with a little privy in the back yard.”
Another 200 were built around town.
Next week: When those houses got their peaked roofs.