We’re wrapping up our look at snow clearing in the early days of Timmins with two more stories this week.
First, museum director-curator Karen Bachmann says in the mid 1930s, the town of Timmins had its first round of “snow chipping”.
“All of the hard packed snow on all of the streets in town was chipped away and hauled away,” she relates. “So they hauled away about a thousand tons of this hard packed snow.”
Even more remarkable is that the chipping was all done by hand by 40 men using picks, shovels and chisels. All of the men were on what was then called “relief”.
TISDALE TWP. BOASTS ABOUT AN ACHIEVEMENT
In 1939 Tisdale Township, which was Schumacher and South Porcupine, boasted in its year-end snow clearing report.
“And they wanted everybody to know that they were very, very efficient with their snowplowing and snow removal,” Bachmann says, “because all of the roads leading to either a school or a mine were actually plowed.”
That’s not to say that any other roads in the township were kept open all winter.