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Ghost Town Dictionary

B&BR - Bessemer & Barry's Bay Railway

Blacksmith - a worker who specializes in the hand-manufacture of ferrous (iron) metal objects. Examples include railings, furniture, cooking utensils and tools.

Blind pig - a business in which liquor was sold illegally and discreetly.

Boarding house - a house in which a lodger rents a room for one or more nights.

Bunkhouse - A railway building which housed single workers.

Cookhouse - An on-site building where meals were prepared for workers.

Cord of wood - 128 cubit feet (4 ft. X 4 ft. X 8 ft.) of stacked wood.

Dry - An area of a mine containing lockers and clothes-baskets, and equipped with showers, toilets and sinks.

Flax mill - a mill or factory where flax is spun or linen is manufactured.

Flume - a natural or manmade channel or chute that carries a stream of water. Flumes were used for furnishing power or transporting logs.

Fulling mill - a machine that shrinks and felts fibers of woolen cloth through the application of moisture, heat, friction, and pressure

Geocaching - an outdoor activity that most often involves the use of a Global Positioning System ("GPS") receiver or traditional navigational techniques to find a "geocache" (or "cache"). Geocaches are usually hidden from plain sight and contain small souveneirs which are exchanged by those who find the cache.

Grist mill - a mill where cleaned grain is ground into flour. Grist mills typically used rotating stones powered by water or steam engines.

ONR - Ontario Northland Railway

Orange Hall - a building used for community purposes such as town meetings.

Ore - a mineral deposit containing a metal or other valuable resource in economically viable concentrations.

Planer mill - a mill with a planer (device used to strip layers of wood)

Postmaster or Postmistress - the head of an individual Post Office.

Pulpwood - timber stocks which are cut for the purpose of making wood pulp for paper production. Pulpwood is usually made of inferior trees where the better trees are used for lumber.

Right-of-Way - The area between and directly adjacent to the tracks.

Sawmill - A facility where logs are cut into boards.

Section house - The house for workers who took care of a section of railway.

Smelter - a factory for producing metal by the reduction of ore.

Spur line - A railway line connected to a trunk line. A spur would often branch off the trunk line into a lumber camp or mine.

Steamboat (steamer) - a boat or vessel propelled by steam power driving a propeller or paddlewheel.

Tailings (gangue) - the rejected material from mining and screening operations.

Tannery - A location where tanning takes place. Tanning is the process of making leather from skin.

Wye - A Y-shaped track used to turn locomotives or cars around