$265.00 CAD
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Interesting early photo album showing lumber camp located at Munroe Siding. Located along the CPR railway track, northwest of Sudbury in Northern Ontario. Later was renamed Wye, then Sheahan.
Summer and winter photos: the camp log buildings, people there, Spanish River, Lake Pogamasing, countryside, canoeing, Ojibway chief Espaniel, home made bridges, etc
50 photos, many have titles written on the frame:
C. 1907-1908 MONROE SIDING CPR tracks – looking West (standing on tracking looking in distance)
Storehouse (CPR train in background)
Garden & Storehouse looking North
Monroe Siding – Base Camp
Monroe Siding Looking E
Spanish River (canoe in river)
Cook Shanty Bunk House Office
Storehouse
Office
1. J.M. Charton 2. Dr. J.A. Hoobie 3. Miles Neault 4. E. pillar--- 5. --- (5 men outside log cabin)
Barns at Monroe (horses in field)
Floating log bridge – Spanish R.
Lake Pogamissing ISLAND Home of Chief Louis Spaniel Ojibway Chief (Espagnol/Espaniol, view of log cabin from lake)
Bunk House Cookery Supt’s Shack
J.M.C’s shack (J.M. Charton)
L. Pogamassing
L. Pogamassing
Gibson’s Camp (log cabin)
Tote Road- Looking N.
Roi Charlton Geo. Allen (2 men outside log cabin)
(interior photos of cabins)
(ladies on sleigh with g*ns and deer)
All album pages with photos. Binding bit loose
12 x 16 x 5 cm
Anyone travelling west on the Budd Car out of Sudbury follows the historic route of the first transcontinental line that was built across Canada in the 1880’s. Dotted along the line are many stops, small villages and towns that were created to service the railway: most were sidings for passing on the single tracked rail line or to lodge section gangs that serviced the road bed and rails. Occasionally, larger service centres, such as Cartier and Chapleau, were built as major rail depots.
However, some stops were created after the rail line was built in the 1880’s due to demand unforeseen at that time. One such place is Sheahan, our stop to access Lake Pogamasing. As the Budd Car approaches the Sheahan stop, a traveller today sees nothing of the siding or former village that existed 75 years ago. At the station, if you glance out the window on the east side of the car, you might notice a vacant field surrounded by a stockade of scruffy jack pines. It would be hard to imagine that in the 1930’s there was a small village of 20 or so buildings belonging to the W. B. Plaunt Lumber Company. However, Plaunt was not the first company to construct buildings and operate from this CPR stop.
The stop at Sheahan has undergone two previous name changes, all reflective of its railway past. The first was called Munro Siding, named after J. W. Munro, a lumberman who needed a siding to unload his supplies into warehouses. Munro logged the area from 1891 to the turn of the century. The subsequent companies that came after – Charltons and Cleveland-Sarnia – added to these buildings as they needed to supply larger logging operations inland.
According to CPR records the siding name changed to Wye in 1917. The reason for this was to reflect the change from a siding to a ‘Y’, which is a railway term indicating that the siding added another arm to to the siding that now forms a triangle. This allowed an engine to reverse its direction so it could return from where it came. It’s difficult to know why the change was needed other than the railway wanted some cars or an extra engine to return to Cartier or Sudbury, rather than continue to Chapleau. However, Donald Warren, a CPR engineer, wrote in a comment following this post that the Y may have been built to deal with the Stralak hill, and once the freight had past it, the extra engine could enter the Y and return to its origin, probably in Cartier.
After White and Plaunt (at that time Ed White was a partner of Plaunt) decided on the site at Wye, they built a sawmill alongside the Spanish River to mill jack pine they drove down from the headwaters (Duke lake) of the east branch of the Spanish River . Once they assessed the Pogamasing area for pine they built more buildings; a stable, bunk houses, an office, a black smith’s shop, a root cellar, and homes for their workers’ families and a school house for their children.
https://andythomsonbooks.ca/2703-2/
