Cemeteries are not the most pleasant thing to talk about, but they’re important to a community, and are the topic for a series in our local history feature.
The Porcupine Mining Camp has three cemeteries. Tisdale, on the highway between South Porcupine and Schumacher; the Timmins Memorial Cemetery on Pine St. S.; and the first one – Whitney, at Dead Man’s Point on Porcupine Lake.
Timmins Museum director-curator Karen Bachmann says during the 1911 Great Porcupine Fire, 77 people died. Several families brought the bodies home to Southern Ontario, Western Canada and the U.S.
“There were some families that had established themselves here and there was a push then to have a cemetery set up,” she says, “so some of those people were buried at Dead Man’s Point.
The following year, the first one in Timmins was established by Father Thériault on the grounds of St. Anthony’s Cathedral, to bury his parishioners. Museum curator Karen Bachmann says he quickly started running out of space.
“There was a decision made to move those people in the Catholic cemetery to another piece of land, and that was the one that started on Pine Street and became the Timmins Memorial Cemetery.”
Next week: the history of the Tisdale Cemetery, and more facts about all three of them.
