We’ve been examining swimming activities in the early days of Timmins for our local history feature the past few weeks.
Museum director-curator Karen Bachmann says one of the strangest stories comes from a hot day in 1923. Cab drivers staged a convoy down Third and Wilson Avenues, right to the river.
“Every single cab driver in Timmins had a great swim. Everybody got dressed again, got back in their cars and resumed normal service,” she says. “This made the newspapers because nobody could figure out what was going on with that.”
The most popular swimming hole in town today, Gillies Lake was a popular beach and campground in the 1920s and 30s.
“That wasn’t part of Timmins at the time,” Bachmann observes. “That was an unorganized kind of township/squatter area. People would go there and do a lot of swimming and that. So in 1932, there was a big push on by people in the community for the town to think about buying that and developing it into a public beach and lo and behold, that is what they did.”