| Local legend has it that the silver boom at COBALT , just off Hwy 11
some 50km north of Temagami, started when a blacksmith named Fred La
Rose threw a hammer at a fox and hit a rock instead, breaking off a
great hunk of silver. Whatever the truth, mining began here in earnest
in 1903. Subsequently, in the frantic search for silver, new mine shafts
were dropped every few weeks and within a decade the haphazard
collection of tents, log cabins and huts had swollen to contain seven
thousand people. With output burgeoning, Cobalt merged with nearby
Haileybury and New Liskeard to form the "tritowns": the miners lived in
Cobalt, the managers on the Lake Temiskaming waterfront in Haileybury;
and the mine owners kept their distance in New Liskeard. Life in Cobalt
was perilous: typhoid, smallpox and flu were common and many of the
homes were built from wooden dynamite boxes, and so were regularly
wrecked by fires. The high times ended with the Great Depression, but
Cobalt struggled on until the steep decline in silver prices in the
1980s. The last mine closed in 1990 and Cobalt's future looks decidedly
gloomy.
Cobalt today is hardly compulsive viewing, but you might drop by
Canada's oldest Mining Museum (June-Sept daily 9am-5pm; Oct-May Mon-Fri
1-4pm; $3.25), housed in a converted newspaper office, with a vast
collection of ores from the mines, including a collection of luminous
stones. Up the street, an old head frame (the top of the mine shaft)
protrudes from the roof of what was once the grocery store - the store
used the disused shaft as a refrigerator - and opposite a small park has
a large painted sign listing the 104 mines operating in 1908.
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