by Eliot Perrin
The Flour Mill neighbourhood in Sudbury serves as an almost mythical place in Franco-Ontarian identity. Much like St-Boniface further west, it survived for decades as a Francophone enclave, maintaining and nurturing the French language, its institutions, and artistic production. For individuals of Franco-Ontarian background such as myself, it remains a place of residual family memory and lore.
Sudbury is a city in Northern Ontario long associated with its massive mining infrastructure. Since the late 1800s, the Sudbury Basin has been mined for nickel that, in the 20th century, came to be in high demand thanks to its use in steel production. As the area’s mining operations expanded, the International Nickel Company (Inco) also built smelting, milling, and refining facilities, further increasing the number of workers in the area. Following successful unionization drives, Sudburians experienced a growing degree of prosperity throughout the 1950s and 60s.
Since its settlement, Sudbury has hosted both Franco-Ontarian institutions and industrial work. Sudbury was chosen as a townsite following the discovery of minerals along the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) construction route in 1883. French Catholic priests were already in the vicinity, providing mass for French-Canadian railway workers. The French Ste-Anne-des-Pins parish (also formed in 1883) sat on the elevated northern half of what would become downtown Sudbury. Other French Catholic institutions soon followed the church itself, including the Hôpital St-Joseph and the St-Louis-de-Gonzague school. Further to the northeast in what later became the Flour Mill, the Jesuits opened the Collège Sacré-Coeur. Both institutions played roles in the protests against the Ontario government’s 1912 Regulation 17, which threatened to ban French-language instruction in private schools beyond the second grade. Meanwhile, the south of downtown was dominated by the CPR yards. These were joined by the Canadian National Railway (CN) whose eastern arm followed the eastern border of the Flour Mill, with a roundhouse located at the bend of Agnes Street.
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