Steven High’s One Job Town provides a century-long industrial history of Sturgeon Falls, a small northern Ontario town. As with many other towns in this region, its founding was linked to late nineteenth-century provincial natural resource policies. In essence, the Ontario government required that timber taken from Crown Lands be sawed or pulped in the province. In exchange for exclusive rights to stands of timber, capitalists agreed to invest in mills and other facilities essential to processing wood and to hire a certain number of workers locally. Towns like Sturgeon Falls grew as workers gravitated toward the mills. Ernest Bremner, representing a British consortium, gained the rights to timber around Sturgeon Falls in 1898 with the proviso that $1 million would be invested and 240 people employed. While contemporary journalists touted the Bremner undertaking as evidence of the success of provincial effort to promote industry, such optimistic assessments were premature....
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March 1, 2021
