For the next few weeks in My Timmins Now Dot Com’s local history feature, we’re going to talk about street names, including who’s behind the names.
We begin this week, with the overall history of naming streets and assigning address numbers.
The last big changes were made early this century, when enhanced 9-1-1 service meant name duplications had to be eliminated. Museum director-curator Karen Bachmann says it was probably the third time for name changes.
Naming and numbering began in 1916 or 17.
“Otherwise, if you were going anywhere,” Bachmann recounts, “it was like ‘yeah, yeah, you know where it is. It’s next door to So-and-So’s house,’ or ‘You know where McLaughlin’s store is, well it’s across the street from that.’”
“Everybody thought ‘this really probably isn’t a really cool idea, if you’re trying to actually get people in town who don’t know anything about the town, to move around town. So that’s when they started it.”
Next week, we’ll get to the most recently changed names of streets, and after whom they’re now named.