Wawa, Ontario

Fort Michipicoten was constructed at the mouth of the Michipicoten River. It was at the junction of the main fur trade route from Montreal westward and the route to James Bay via the Missinaibi River. The town developed five miles upriver from here.

Michipicoten, 1897

Community of Michipicoten River

French explorers reached the area by at least 1681, and militia built the post in either 1725 or 1727.[4] By 1729, it was an outpost of Fort Kaministiquia in Vérendrye's Postes du Nord. The site was on the south bank of the river, opposite the mouth of the Magpie River. When the British conquered Canada in 1763, this post was abandoned.

Four years later, it was re-opened on the same site by fur traders Alexander Henry the elder and Jean Baptiste Cadotte. The route from James Bay was explored by Edward Jarvis (1775) and Philip Turnor (1781). In 1783, it was taken over by the North West Company, based in Montreal. In 1797, the Hudson's Bay Company built a rival post on the north bank.

With the union of the two companies in 1821, the Lake Superior trade was diverted from Montreal to Hudson Bay via Michipicoten. This lasted until 1863, when the arrival of steamboats and railways made it unnecessary. From 1827, the fort was the headquarters of the Superior Division, and several annual meetings were held here. It was a centre for fishing, boat-building and small-scale manufacture and repair. It also served as a base for missionaries and surveyors. It was closed in 1904 and gradually taken apart. By 1980 the site held little more than a grassy clearing, some foundation stones, and the remains of the dock.[5][6]

Wawa's history is rich in mining, forestry, and the fur trade. Mining attempts began as early as the late 1660s.

William Teddy discovered gold on Wawa Lake in 1897. The population of Wawa village quickly grew with 1,700 claims staked in 1898. However, most gold production stopped by 1906. Beginning in 1914 with the completion of the Algoma Central Railway, gold production commenced again from 22 prospects.[7]

In 1898, the town site at what is now called "the Mission" was registered as "Michipicoten City." In 1899, Wawa was surveyed and plotted as a town and registered as Wawa City. In the latter half of the 1950s, the town's name was temporarily changed to Jamestown in honour of Sir James Hamet Dunn, but it was later returned to Wawa at the request of the community's residents.

Gold production had slowed by 1906, but as mining technology improved, additional amounts began to be extracted from the area. Gold mining in the Wawa area prospered and receded several times in the 20th century, and it continues today. Notable producers include the Grace Mine (1902-1944), which produced 15,191 ounces, the Minto Mine (1929-1942), which produced 37,678 ounces, the Parkhill Mine (1902-1944), which produced 54,301 ounces, and the Renabie Mine (1920-1991), which produced 1.1 million ounces.[7]

Iron ore extraction has also been an important industry in the area. The search for gold during the Michipicoten boom led to the unexpected discovery in 1897 of iron ore. Francis Hector Clergue, an American entrepreneur, immediately recognized the iron ore for its potential; he established a steel company at Sault Ste. Marie. Wawa was served by the Algoma Central Railway to ship ore for processing.

The first supply of ore extracted from the Helen Mine was shipped to Midland, Ontario, in July 1900; this was the "first boat shipment of Canadian iron ore to a Canadian port." The mine produced high-grade iron ore until 1903, when operations shut down due to financial difficulties encountered by Clergue and his company. By 1904, the mine had returned to full production capabilities and was mining one thousand tons of hematite ore a day. From 1900 to 1918, the Helen Mine had the largest production of any iron mine in Canada.

In 1909, a second hematite ore deposit was uncovered near the Magpie River, twelve miles north of the Helen Mine. The Algoma Steel Corporation, organized between 1904 and 1909 in Sault Ste. Marie, bought up the claims and operated both the Magpie and Helen mines for the next decade. The Helen Mine continued ore production until 1918, when the company felt the reserve of hematite ore was finally depleted. The same fate followed the Magpie Mine in 1921. The Census of Canada records that the population of the Michipicoten region in 1921 experienced a drop from 1,001 in 1911 to 101 just ten years later.

It was not until 1937, with the threat of war in Europe and the emergence of a profitable market for Canadian iron ore, that the Helen Mine was reopened. A sintering plant was constructed on the northern bank of the Magpie River, two miles west of the mine. It was used to treat the siderite ore before it was shipped to the blast furnaces at Algoma Steel in Sault Ste. Marie. The plant became the centre for a small community called Sinterville, composed of workers and their families.

The Helen Mine remained an open pit operation until 1950, from which point on all production came from underground mining. In 1960, the new George W. MacLeod Mine went into production adjacent to the Helen Mine. The ore was transported on an aerial tramline that consisted of over 280 steel three-ton buckets traveling underground and then emerging three-quarters of a mile west of the 2,066-foot vertical MacLeod Shaft. The tramline continued the remaining two miles to the sinter plant on overhead cables. This system was replaced in 1979 by the latest in underground mining technology, the highest-lift single-drive conveyor in the world.

During the summer of 1971, Wawa hosted an archaeological field camp known as the Wawa Drop-In Project or the Big Dig,[8] for young hitchhikers traveling along Highway 17. The project was directed by Professor K.C.A. Dawson[9] and supported by the federal government as part of its youth employment program. The results of this fieldwork at several important sites were never published. The records are currently held by the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa.[10]

Throughout the 1990s, Wawa and the Algoma Ore Division continued to be challenged by international market problems that plagued both the gold and iron mining industries. In December 1997, Algoma Steel announced that it could no longer support the high cost of extracting low-grade iron at Algoma Ore Division. Although Wawa's mountain of iron ore had more to give, operations were shut down in June 1998, one hundred years after iron was first discovered in this remote corner of northern Algoma.

Wawa suffered a population decline after the closures of Helen Mine and the sinter plant. Its main industries have been forestry and tourism. In recent years, diamond prospecting and proposals to create a trap rock mine on the shore of Lake Superior have been developed; however, no mining activities of any kind have yet been established.

In October 2007 Weyerhauser, which operated an oriented strandboard mill 30 kilometres east of the town, announced an indefinite shutdown of its mill. The final production shift ran at the end of December 2007. Given low demand for wood products, the likelihood of the mill reopening was marginal at best. Since the shutdown, Wawa's economy has suffered a near complete collapse, as the closure resulted in over 135 lost jobs, and more residents left the area. This has had a spinoff effect on other businesses and on the town's population. It peaked at close to 5,600 in the 1990s but has since dropped to under 3,000, according to the 2011 Canadian census.

The collapse of the forestry industry in the first decade of the 2000s also adversely affected the neighbouring communities of Dubreuilville and White River. Wawa, the area's largest settlement, has faced difficulties in attracting new industry to the community and region.