Today’s local history segment is our final instalment looking back at the beginnings of gardening in the Porcupine Mining Camp.
In the 1920s, the horticultural society started running an annual show at the McIntyre Arena… with several awards for individual gardeners.
Museum director-curator Karen Bachmann says the mines competed among themselves.
“Each of the mines would set up these huge, elaborate displays of things that they had grown on the properties” she says, “but also beautiful displays of flowers, and create little vignettes. The McIntyre had a conderful thing, where they actually moved a cottage into the arena and did a whole decorating thing around it.”
That beautification and sense of competition extended to townsites, like the one occupied by employees of the Hollinger.
“And the horticultural society in September would give our prizes and there’d be big features in the Hollinger Miner Magazine about who won this year, and everybody took real pride in these kinds of things and making their houses look really pretty.”
The full interview that went into the gardening series posted below.
