As summer begins, we wrap up our look at the roots of gardening in Timmins, for this week’s local history feature.
Museum director-curator Karen Bachmann says the competitive spirit of the McIntyre and Hollinger mines spread to the Hollinger townsite.
“So the lovely little green and red homes that were all along Messines and Vimy and all of those areas, everybody started to plant some gardens and there were some really flamboyant gardens,” she tells us.
Bachmann adds that you didn’t have to go far to find a huge variety of garden products, from vegetables to flowerbeds, rose bushes and lilac trees.
(Timmins Museum: National Exhibition Centre)
Some of us are old enough to remember the beautiful gardens and fountain in front of the Hollinger office building, where the junction of Algonquin Boulevard and Highway 655 is now.
“That idea of the mines being big and dirty places, I think they were trying to counteract that,” Bachmann observes, “and say ‘we do do things within the community and we do try to make our communities good.’”
She notes that we still see that today, in all the projects undertaken by Newmont; earlier mining reclamation projects and activities like beekeeping.