Our local history feature has been looking at early women in the Porcupine Mining Camp and the businesses they started.
Our material is, of course, provided by local historian Karen Bachmann.
“So Mrs. Kinnunen came to the Porcupine with her husband in 1912,” she narrates. “She ran a rooming house that charged one dollar a day, which entitled the men to full meals and she did their washing.
Ma and Pa Potts, for whom Pottsville is named, which is in the Porcupine area, ran the Shuniah Hotle and Rooming House in 1910; and their establishment escaped the fire of 1911 and remained an important business in the camp for a number of years.”
HEROIC NURSE
Laura Keon came to the area in 1918, after serving in the First World War. Bachmann says she was put in charge of the nurses in the emergency hospital in Timmins.
“Unfortunately, she had contracted the disease and four days after contracting the disease, had passed away. And she was staying in her apartment above the new Empire Theatre where she passed away and that is now the site of the Timmins Seniors Centre on Third Ave.”
Keon’s mother came up from Pembroke to claim her body. The large cortege to the train station was led by nurses she had worked with, carrying a silk British flag.
