Once upon a Cheminis
by Richard Buell
Originally published in the April 2006 issue of HighGrader Magazine (www.HighGrader.com)

The pufferbellies of the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway stopped here once. They didn't just stop here, they turned around and went back to where they came from, back to Virginiatown, to Larder Lake, back to Dobie and West Dobie, and to King Kirkland and Kirkland Lake, and to Swastika.

After the train stopped here, after the few passengers lumbered to the ground and got their bearings, after the freight for the lumber mill and the general store, the school master and the little churches was unloaded, after the stationmaster punched what he had to punch and telegraphed who he had to telegraph, the engine wheezed its way onto a "Y" and pointed its sooty snout back toward the west, back toward what was called civilization.

Nick and Steve carrying water

To a hardy few, this was home, the only home many of them would ever know. This was the north, where children saw the first light of day in the cold bedrooms of wood-framed houses, where those facing the rigors of isolation for the first time laid the foundation for a lifetime of memories. Today, it's the windswept home of the ghosts of the lumbermen and prospectors, the healers and the bootleggers, the young lovers and the railway road gangs.

This is a ghost town. It used to be Cheminis. It used to be home.

Aboriginals gave their unique name to ghost town

Cheminis didn't become Cheminis just because of the railway, the twin ribbons of steel that the T&NO pushed eastward out of Swastika in 1927. Eventually, the railway would reach Rouyn-Noranda in Québec, but in the 1930s Cheminis was the end of the line. Before the railway came, however, there was considerable activity in both logging and prospecting, and before that, a wonderful history that remains locked in the legends and tales and the minds of a century's roll call of too many dead and scattered Aboriginals.

Stories handed down to people of the Beaverhouse First Nation, a remote people settled on Howard Lake a little to the northwest of what was Cheminis, reveal that even the name of the once-busy logging and railway community comes from an Algonkian word for "healer."

Marcia Brown and Gloria MacKenzie of the Beaverhouse First Nation band office in Kirkland Lake recall being told that the name is derived from the word "Chamminis," which Anglophones would most probably recognize more readily as "Shamanis," or "the place of healing or healers."

A Shaman, of course, is legendary as an Aboriginal healer in many different cultures.

It might have been too much to expect the earliest settlers to call the settlement by its Aboriginal name, so the likelihood that it was simply Anglicized to Cheminis can't be discounted.

The former railway stop and lumbering village is just a half-mile or so from the Québec border, so some have speculated the settlement got its name from the French word for road, chemin, or even from the word for railroad, chemin-de-fer. The more adventurous even suggest it might have something to do with the French word for chimney, chiminie, because of a wart on the landscape a little to the southeast that pokes skyward like a lost kimberlite pipe out of the boreal forest.

The geological anomaly known to Ontarians as Mount Cheminis and to Québecois as Mont Chaudron (because it resembles an inverted chaudron, a cast-iron pot used for cooking by early natives and woodsman) is part of a loose connection of such anomalies in the region. But it is most certainly not a chimney, as a volcano might have been described.

Still, whether the hill is called chaudron, sugar-loaf or Cheminis or the community is named for an iron road or a healer, the years of growing up and raising a family in a dead-end railroad stop are locked securely in the hard drives of the mind of William Spack and his wife, Marilyn.

The Spacks are comfortable now in their tidy home in Kearns, on Highway 66, about a Mike Weir chip shot from the Québec border, about three miles down the road from where once there was a Cheminis.

Bill Spack was just three or four years old when he first came to Cheminis in 1930, just three years after the railway arrived from Swastika. His father was a railway man, but he also had a general store, and at the back of the general store was a pool table, where locals could squint through the cigarette smoke to line up a combination in the corner or could lean against the wall and sip some illicit hooch supplied by a local bootlegger. Illicit selling of spirits was common in these early isolated communities.

Cheminis Station

Cheminis was a reality even before the railway arrived. Larder Lake had undergone a prospecting rush earlier in the century and some of the activity spilled over to the area a little to the north and east of the lakeside village, north and east of what would become known as Virginiatown.

T&NO engine

The logging industry was also fairly active, and there was a sort of cart or wagon path running between Cheminis and Rouyn-Noranda that was used to keep the little community supplied with necessities before the arrival of the T&NO Railway. Kirkland Lake Timber was the longest lasting of the forestry concerns in Cheminis, but there were many others, including a mill run by the Kaplan brothers, although Bill Spack doesn't think it was the same Kaplan family that developed a number of Kirkland Lake properties.

Charron's Lumber called Cheminis home in the late 1920s, even though it was on the Québec side of the border. In 1930, Charron's pulled up stakes and moved further into La Belle Province, to Kanusuta, which was served by the Nipissing Central Railway.

Three other sawmills started up in early 1927, Pacey Brothers, Palmer and Lalonde and Playford and Sons, but none were as long lasting as Kirkland Lake Lumber. Cheminis Lumber, currently operating a mill near Larder Lake, was never actually in Cheminis. For 40 years the company had operated at Foxhearth Lake in the Virginiatown area before moving to its present location in 1988.

As would certainly be the case in any small, remote northern community at the time, communications, medical care, schooling and church buildings were as vital as were pool halls and bootleggers. The father of current Kirkland Lake surgeon Dr. Jim Rumball used to take the train to Cheminis, spend the day treating all manners of illnesses and complaints, and return to Kirkland Lake the next day.

Visitors to the settlement could stay at Kelly's Hotel (where Kirkland Lake's Northern News reported in 1926 that Paddy Conway of Ansonville had backed into a stove and ruined his suit of clothes), or at Jack Woak's Hotel, which burned down in 1934.

John Laca's store

Although the Spacks don't recall forest fires being too much of a threat in their little community, fires within the remote settlement were common and often devastating. In 1929 fire burned down the Post Office, Emonds General Store (where Albert Emond's father would take blueberries in payment for other goods) and three other frame buildings before burning itself out. And in 1930, Edward Skehan, the local chemist, saw his drugstore burn to the ground along with a nearby shack. There was no electricity. Wood stoves were used for heating and cooking, while coal oil lamps gave the light.

Mysteries of the Cheminis mountain

The geological anomaly on the Ontario-Québec border known variously as Mont Chaudron, Mount Cheminis and Sugar-Loaf Mountain is part of a chain of such blips on the landscape in the area. Technically, it's called a monadnock, and it's a remnant of the last ice age. As the glacier moved southward to eventually even cover parts of the Ohio Valley, it occasionally would run into resistance in the form of these bulbous monadnocks, mounds of sedementary rock that simply couldn't be scraped away by the relentless advance of the ice. Seen from the air, it's obvious that the glacial movement was diverted at Cheminis - the mountain itself sits at the point of a V-shaped line of ridges, left intact as the ice was diverted to the east and the west of the resistant mound of rock.

Cheminis mountain

Long before Pierre de Troyes led his band of motley adventurers through the area on his way to thump the British at their James and Hudson Bay posts, legend has it that the steeply-sided mountain was used as a place of sacrifice by the earliest inhabitants of the area, the forefathers of today's Nishinawbe and Aski, the Cree and the Ojibwa. More provable, perhaps, is the fact that in 1955, the Northern Daily News reported that "the body of a man, minus a head, two hands and a right foot was found on the top of Mount Cheminis. Nearby was a shotgun and an empty cartridge in the chamber. The clothes were 'city clothes,' not bush clothing. There was absolutely no identification and nobody has been reported missing in the area since July, 1954."

Cheminis had all the amenities of larger towns

When it's all you've ever known, growing up in a little place like Cheminis isn't the challenge it might appear to an outsider.
"There was always something for us to do," said Bill Spack. "We had our own ball field, and even though we didn't have a formal skating rink, every winter we'd scrape the snow off Ginnets Lake and we'd do a lot of the same things the boys and girls in Kirkland Lake and Larder Lake would do on their outdoor rinks."

Both Anglicans and Catholics had their churches. The Catholic church was a refurbished barn that had been moved from Barber-Larder Mines using Kerr-Addison Mines transport equipment. Andre Dorfman, manager at the Kerr-Addison Mine, was responsible for the donation of the old building.

A year later, in 1950, Rev. Ted Gray held the first services in St. John the Baptist Anglican Church, using another donated building, an old 20'x30' change house again donated by Andre Dorfman of Kerr-Addison. The Chesterville Mine donated land for the church in Cheminis.

Kay Catherine Spack (1940s)

After the railway arrived to serve the prospecting community in 1924, an attempt was made to set up a school system, but it was 1926 before a public school was organized. It was a form of home schooling - although a provincial government curriculum was used, there was no school building. Teachers Mr. Speck and Mr. Moir held classes in their own homes.

By 1938, over the vocal opposition of the Cheminis residents, the school was closed and the students were taken to a new school in Virginiatown.

When the Cheminis school closed, it was bought by Bill Spack's father and converted into a family home.

"We didn't have anything like plowed roads in the winter until the 1940s," said Marilyn, "so winters were pretty isolated. All we had was the railway and the wagon road to Rouyn-Noranda." (In 1926, Walter Little ran a twice-weekly snow mobile trip to Rouyn.)

Although Cheminis had no power in the early years, by 1925 there was a telephone/telegraph line under construction, which opened Jan. 9, 1926 and provided for communications between Cheminis and Rouyn.

The entire settlement wasn't totally electrified until 1952.

Bill and Marilyn, married in 1956, laughed when they remembered how laundry was done in the early days of wedded bliss.
"We had a gasoline-powered washing machine made by Beatty," said Marilyn. "There was no gas station at Cheminis, so we had to get our gas from 45-gallon drums that Bill's dad brought in."

They were fortunate to have a car - Bill had bought his first new vehicle, a half-ton pickup, in 1952 for $1,875. After an accident with the truck, he bought a new Ford in 1953.

Bootleggers were common, and Bill recalls one of the more interesting entrepreneurs whose house straddled the Ontario-Québec border. When his dwelling was raided by the Ontario Provincial Police, it seemed all his liquor was on the Québec side of the house. When the Sureté raided, the hooch was in Ontario.

"It was a pretty good place to grow up," said Bill. There are lots of memories, lots of history. There was a mining property called the Russian Kid back of Cheminis because it was staked by a young Russian prospector who lived like a hermit. We had a radio so we could listen to the news of the outside world, and hear the action when Joe Louis was boxing. We could fish and hunt, even though most of our food was store-bought. And I can still hear the trains.

"I can still remember the sound of the whistle, and the steam."