Peace and quiet returns to your house next week, when the new school year begins. For the next few weeks, our local history feature examines early schools in the Porcupine Mining Camp.
Timmins Museum director-curator Karen Bachmann has the writings of John Campsall, a local historian back in the 1960s and 70s. He survived the Great Porcupine Fire of 1911 and began school the following year in a building at Duke St. and Third Ave. in Porcupine.
“The blackboards eventually came and were installed,” Bachmann reads. “On one wall was hung a picture of Custer’s Last Stand; on another wall hung a picture of the death of Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham; on the front wall over the blackboard was hung a Union Jack flag.”
The rest of Campsall’s recollections as read by Karen Bachmann, in audio form right here.
TIMMINS’ FIRST SCHOOL HAS TWO POSSIBILITIES
In Timmins itself, there are two possibilities for the first-school title.
“It was a two-room schoolhouse located on what is now Algonquin Boulevard,” Bachmann tells us. The teacher in charge was Miss Elizabeth Taylor – not that one, but another one. And the other possible first school titleholder was a small schoolhouse on Third Ave.”
That second one was clapboard construction with one large room, two big windows and a porch on the front of it.
