You can’t talk about the history of Timmins without talking about gold. It’s the foundation of the area in every sense.
So this week, museum director-curator Karen Bachmann is talking about it, in light of the current value of the precious metal.
“Gold is at an astronomical level at this point, probably the highest it’s ever been,” she remarks.
The Porcupine mining camp still has exploration going on, looking for gold and maybe starting new mines.
“Since 1910” says Bachmann, “we’ve probably produced and extracted over 70-million ounces of gold in this area. By comparison, the Klondike, which is still running, since 1898 they’re produced 20-million ounces of gold.”
Bachmann says this is still rated as one of the top five gold camps in the world.
Between 1910 and 1920, there were 16 major producers in the Porcupine mining camp.
“These are mines that were running, had full groups of minters that were working at it. Very intense production. They were doing really, really well.”
Among those historic mine names are Hollinger, Dome and McIntyre. We’ll discuss more of them next week.
