L’allée des Millionnaires

Haileybury’s Millionaires’s Lane still stands out for its opulent mansions, overlooking the lake. These houses, built at the beginning of the 20th century, show the flourishing opulence of the place following the discovery of silver and cobalt mines. These were once owned by managers, mine prospectors and forestry contractors.

By 1910, Haileybury was a bustling community with electric streetcar service and several large hotels. It also saw majestic homes along Lakeshore Road, known as Millionaire’s Row. There was also a National Hockey Association team: the Haileybury Comets.

Once the area with the most millionaires in Canada, Lakeshore Drive or "Millionaire's Row" still has some of the largest and most beautiful homes in Temiskaming Shores.

Blacksmith Fred LaRose discovered silver in 1903 while working for the railroad, and probably never in history has so haphazard a method of rock sampling yielded such rich dividends.
 

Mining was not an easy job. Ore was mined with picks, hammers and drilling bars and hoisted to the surface by hand.
 

The mines at that time were all very small and most were simple operations.

An overview of the silver bars collected at the time.  

Such headframes have appeared in many places, just above wells dug in the earth for underground hard rock mining. This structure is used to descend and raise the miners, as well as the ore, via an elevator shaft.

Headframes are to northern Ontario what grain elevators are to the prairies, and fishing boats to the Maritimes. Wherever there has been an underground mining operation in northern Ontario, a headframe existed.

Haileybury’s Millionaires’s Lane still stands out for its opulent mansions, overlooking the lake. These houses, built at the beginning of the 20th century, show the flourishing opulence of the place following the discovery of silver and cobalt mines. These were once owned by managers, mine prospectors and forestry contractors.

Legend has it that a blacksmith, Fred Larose, tossed his hammer at a fox that was pestering him as he worked. When he retrieved his hammer, he noticed a strange-coloured rock that would eventually be analyzed and found to be silver. That occurred 8 km from here and the area would be named Cobalt, a mining town back in the day. In 1905, mine development began and prospered to such an extent that, by 1909, there were 12,000 more people in the area.

Prospectors became interested in potential mining opportunities in Kirkland Lake, Porcupine, Timmins and Rouyn-Noranda. During Cobalt’s silver rush, twelve of Canada’s 35 millionaires settled here, mainly on Lakeshore Street, while others helped expand the towns of Haileybury and New Liskeard.