Greenstone is an amalgamated town in the

Canadian province Within the geographical areas of Canada, the ten provinces and three territories are sub-national administrative divisions under the jurisdiction of the Canadian Constitution. In the 1867 Canadian Confederation, three provinces of British North ...

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central Ca ...

with a population of 4,636 according to the

2016 Canadian Census The 2016 Canadian census was an enumeration of Canadian residents, which counted a population of 35,151,728, a change from its 2011 population of 33,476,688. The census, conducted by Statistics Canada, was Canada's seventh quinquennial census. ...

. It stretches along Highway 11 from

Lake Nipigon Lake Nipigon (; french: lac Nipigon; oj, Animbiigoo-zaaga'igan) is part of the Great Lakes drainage basin. It is the largest lake entirely within the boundaries of the Canadian province of Ontario. Etymology In the Jesuit Relations the lake is ...

to Longlac and covers . The town was formed in 2001, as part of a wave of community amalgamations under the Progressive Conservative government of Ontario. It combined the former Townships of Beardmore and Nakina, the Towns of Geraldton and Longlac with large unincorporated portions of

Unorganized Thunder Bay District Unorganized Thunder Bay District is an unorganized area in northwestern Ontario, Canada in Thunder Bay District. It comprises all parts of the district that are not part of an incorporated municipality or a First Nations reserve. Most of the terr ...

. It is the administrative office of the

band government In Canada, an Indian band or band (french: bande indienne, link=no), sometimes referred to as a First Nation band (french: bande de la Première Nation, link=no) or simply a First Nation, is the basic unit of government for those peoples subjec ...

for the

Animbiigoo Zaagi'igan Anishinaabek First Nation Animbiigoo Zaagi'igan Anishinaabek First Nation is an Ojibwe First Nation in northwestern Ontario. It has a reserve on Partridge Lake called Lake Nipigon Indian Reserve within the town of Greenstone. It is a member of Waaskiinaysay Ziibi Inc. ...

Communities

Greenstone includes the communities of Beardmore, Caramat, Geraldton, Jellicoe, Longlac, Macdiarmid, Nakina and Orient Bay. The municipal administrative offices are located in Geraldton. Nakina and Caramat are entirely exclaved from the rest of the municipality's territory. File:Geraldton ON.JPG, Geraldton File:Beardmore ON.JPG, Beardmore File:Longlac ON 2.JPG, Longlac File:Nakina ON.JPG, Nakina

History

T. L. Taunton, of the

Geological Survey of Canada The Geological Survey of Canada (GSC; french: Commission géologique du Canada (CGC)) is a Canadian federal government agency responsible for performing geological surveys of the country, developing Canada's natural resources and protecting the en ...

, noted gold in

quartz Quartz is a hard, crystalline mineral composed of silica (silicon dioxide). The atoms are linked in a continuous framework of SiO4 silicon-oxygen tetrahedra, with each oxygen being shared between two tetrahedra, giving an overall chemical form ...

fragments around Little Long Lac in 1917. Similarly, Tony Oklend found

ore Ore is natural rock or sediment that contains one or more valuable minerals, typically containing metals, that can be mined, treated and sold at a profit.Encyclopædia Britannica. "Ore". Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 7 Apr ...

in a boulder during

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

. However, it wouldn't be until 1931 that Bill "Hard Rock" Smith and Stan Watson would stake 18 claims along 3

veins Veins are blood vessels in humans and most other animals that carry blood towards the heart. Most veins carry deoxygenated blood from the tissues back to the heart; exceptions are the pulmonary and umbilical veins, both of which carry oxygenated b ...

. Tom Johnson and Robert Wells filed claims based on gold appearing in Magnet Lake quartz

outcrop An outcrop or rocky outcrop is a visible exposure of bedrock or ancient superficial deposits on the surface of the Earth. Features Outcrops do not cover the majority of the Earth's land surface because in most places the bedrock or superficial ...

and the presence of

bismuthinite Bismuthinite is a mineral consisting of bismuth sulfide ( Bi2 S3). It is an important ore for bismuth. The crystals are steel-grey to off-white with a metallic luster. It is soft enough to be scratched with a fingernail and rather dense. Bismu ...

. The Bankfield Gold Mine developed from these claims. In 1932, Johnson and Oklend staked 12 claims at Little Long Lac. Fred MacLeod and Arthur Cockshutt filed 15 claims near Smith's. Nakina was established in 1923 as a station and railway yard on the

National Transcontinental Railway The National Transcontinental Railway (NTR) was a historic railway between Winnipeg and Moncton in Canada. Much of the line is now operated by the Canadian National Railway. The Grand Trunk partnership The completion of construction of Canada's ...

, between the

divisional point In Canada, a divisional point (or division point) is a local operational headquarters for a railway. Divisional points are significant in railway maintenance of way operations. Especially historically, they could be the location of facilities and in ...

s of

Grant Grant or Grants may refer to: Places *Grant County (disambiguation) Australia * Grant, Queensland, a locality in the Barcaldine Region, Queensland, Australia United Kingdom *Castle Grant United States * Grant, Alabama *Grant, Inyo County, C ...

and Armstrong. Nakina was at Mile 15.9 of the NTR's Grant Sub-Division. Following the completion in 1924 of the Longlac-Nakina Cut-Off by the

Canadian National Railway The Canadian National Railway Company (french: Compagnie des chemins de fer nationaux du Canada) is a Canadian Class I freight railway headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, which serves Canada and the Midwestern and Southern United States. CN i ...

, connecting the rails of the

Canadian Northern Railway The Canadian Northern Railway (CNoR) was a historic Canadian transcontinental railway. At its 1923 merger into the Canadian National Railway , the CNoR owned a main line between Quebec City and Vancouver via Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Edmonton. Mani ...

at Longlac and the NTR, Nakina became the new divisional point, and the buildings from the town of Grant ( to the east) were moved to the new Nakina town site. In the 1930s the

Beardmore Relics The Beardmore Relics are a cache of Viking Age artifacts, said to have been unearthed near Beardmore, Ontario, Canada in the 1930s. The cache consists of a Viking Age sword, an axe head, and a bar of undetermined use (possibly a part of a shiel ...

Viking Age The Viking Age () was the period during the Middle Ages when Norsemen known as Vikings undertook large-scale raiding, colonizing, conquest, and trading throughout Europe and reached North America. It followed the Migration Period and the Ger ...

artifacts were found near Beardmore, which were proposed to be evidence of

Vikings Vikings ; non, víkingr is the modern name given to seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded and se ...

in Ontario. Later, the relics were proven to have been a hoax. Through a series of witnesses as well as the son of the person who had found them, the relics were found to have been planted in Beardmore and not, as was suggested, found there. By 1934, a gold rush absorbed the area from Long Lac to

Nipigon Nipigon () is a township in Thunder Bay District, Northwestern Ontario, Canada, located along the west side of the Nipigon River and south of the small Lake Helen running between Lake Nipigon and Lake Superior. Lake Nipigon is located approximate ...

, a belt long and wide. The village of Hard Rock was established in 1934, and Longlac, Bankfield, and Geraldton soon followed. Though a 1936 fire threatened the mines, development was able to continue. As an important railway service stop from 1923 until 1986, the town had a railway round-house as well as a watering and fuelling capability. During World War II, there was also a radar base on the edge of the town, intended to watch for a potential attack on the strategically important

Soo Locks The Soo Locks (sometimes spelled Sault Locks but pronounced "soo") are a set of parallel locks, operated and maintained by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, Detroit District, that enable ships to travel between Lake Superior and the lowe ...

at Sault Ste. Marie. Research into the

radar Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the distance (''ranging''), angle, and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, w ...

site in the

Library and Archives Canada Library and Archives Canada (LAC; french: Bibliothèque et Archives Canada) is the federal institution, tasked with acquiring, preserving, and providing accessibility to the documentary heritage of Canada. The national archive and library is th ...

indicates that it was largely a

United States Army Air Forces The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF or AAF) was the major land-based aerial warfare service component of the United States Army and ''de facto'' aerial warfare service branch of the United States during and immediately after World War II ...

operation, pre-dating the

Pinetree Line The Pinetree Line was a series of radar stations located across the northern United States and southern Canada at about the 50th parallel north, along with a number of other stations located on the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic and Pacific coasts. ...

radar bases that were erected to focus on the

Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...

threat. The Nakina base was totally removed shortly after the war. The settlement of Geraldton is a compound of the surname of financiers of a nearby gold mine near Kenogamisis Lake in 1931 (Fitzgerald and Errington). The Geraldton-Beardmore Gold Camp, in the heart of the Canadian Shield, hosts numerous mineralized zones which continue to be explored for potential development. Eight gold mines operated here between 1936 and 1970. Tom Powers and Phil Silams staked what became the Northern Empire Mine (1925-1988) near Beardmore, which produced a total of 149,493 ounces of gold. The Little Long Lac Mine (1934-1953) produced 605,449 ounces of gold, besides producing

scheelite Scheelite is a calcium tungstate mineral with the chemical formula Ca W O4. It is an important ore of tungsten (wolfram). Scheelite is originally named after Swedish chemist K. Scheele (1742-1786). Well-formed crystals are sought by collectors a ...

. J.M. Wood and W.T. Brown developed the Sturgeon River Gold Mine (1936-1942), which produced 73,438 ounces of gold. James and Russell Cryderman found and Karl Springer incorporated what became known as the Leitch Gold Mine (1936-1968), which produced 861,982 ounces of gold from 0.92 grade ore. The Bankfield Gold Mines produced 66,416 ounces by 1942. Tomball Mines (1938-1942), started by Tom and Bill Johnson, produced 69,416 ounces. The Magnet Mine (1938-1942) produced 152,089 ounces. The Hard Rock Mine (1938-1951) produced 269,081 ounces, while the MacLeod-Cockshutt (1938-1970) produced 1,516,980 ounces. In the 1970s pulp and paper operations near the town resulted in growth in the town's population to its peak of approximately 1,200. However, at this point, cost controls in the railway industry meant that service and maintenance could be consolidated at points much more distant from one another than had been common in the first half of the 20th century. As a result, the value of Nakina as a railway service community was greatly diminished, to the point where the railway was no longer a substantial employer in the town. Also in the 1970s, a radio station was launched in Longlac as CHAP on the AM dial; this station left the air by the late 1970s. The town remains focused on tourism, diminished pulp and paper operations and support of other more northern communities (food, fuel and transportation). Mining and minerals industries are often seen as a source of further growth, though the

Canadian Shield The Canadian Shield (french: Bouclier canadien ), also called the Laurentian Plateau, is a geologic shield, a large area of exposed Precambrian igneous and high-grade metamorphic rocks. It forms the North American Craton (or Laurentia), the anc ...

geology of the area makes extraction of minerals like gold an expensive operation. , a proposed ore transport point around Nakina, as part of the

Ring of Fire The Ring of Fire (also known as the Pacific Ring of Fire, the Rim of Fire, the Girdle of Fire or the Circum-Pacific belt) is a region around much of the rim of the Pacific Ocean where many volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur. The Ring o ...

development, may shift the emphasis of local industry from logging back to mining. In 2010 the Ring of Fire development, proposed James Bay rail link and placement of processing plants remains of great economic interest for the region. Development was expected to cost more than $1.5 billion. In 2019, negotiations with communities were continuing. On 19 February 2011, Beardmore was temporarily evacuated after a major explosion ruptured the

TransCanada pipeline The TransCanada pipeline is a system of natural gas pipelines, up to in diameter, that carries gas through Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. It is maintained by TransCanada PipeLines, LP. It is the longest pipeline in Canad ...

in the community.

Demographics

In the 2021 Census of Population conducted by

Statistics Canada Statistics Canada (StatCan; french: Statistique Canada), formed in 1971, is the agency of the Government of Canada commissioned with producing statistics to help better understand Canada, its population, resources, economy, society, and cultur ...

, Greenstone had a population of living in of its total private dwellings, a change of from its 2016 population of . With a land area of , it had a population density of in 2021.

Government

Greenstone's mayor is James McPherson. The Greenstone Public Library has branches in Beardmore, Geraldton (the Elsie Dugard Centennial Branch), Longlac and Nakina (the Helen Mackie Memorial Branch).

Insignia

On March 4, 2006 Letters Patent were presented by the

Canadian Heraldic Authority The Canadian Heraldic Authority (CHA; french: Autorité héraldique du Canada) is part of the Canadian honours system under the Canadian monarch, whose authority is exercised by the Governor General of Canada. The authority is responsible for th ...

, granting arms, flag and badge to the Corporation of the Municipality of Greenstone. The flag consists in a banner of arms while the badge is described as: on a miner’s pick and a double-bitted axe in saltire Argent hafted Vert, a railway wheel Or charged with a grey wolf’s head erased proper.

Climate

Greenstone experiences a

humid continental climate A humid continental climate is a climatic region defined by Russo-German climatologist Wladimir Köppen in 1900, typified by four distinct seasons and large seasonal temperature differences, with warm to hot (and often humid) summers and freezing ...

(

Köppen climate classification The Köppen climate classification is one of the most widely used climate classification systems. It was first published by German-Russian climatologist Wladimir Köppen (1846–1940) in 1884, with several later modifications by Köppen, notabl ...

''Dfb''), with cold winters and warm summers. The highest temperature ever recorded in the area was on 11 and 12 July 1936 at Longlac. The coldest temperature ever recorded was on 31 January 1996 (at Geraldton Airport).

In film

The

First Nations First Nations or first peoples may refer to: * Indigenous peoples, for ethnic groups who are the earliest known inhabitants of an area. Indigenous groups *First Nations is commonly used to describe some Indigenous groups including: **First Natio ...

television series ''

Spirit Bay ''Spirit Bay'' was an aboriginal family television show of 13 half-hour episodes that aired on CBC Television and TVOntario from 1982 to 1987. The show focuses on the lives of townsfolk on an Ojibwe reservation town near MacDiarmid, Ontario. Here, ...

'' was shot here by the CBC in the mid-1980s at the Biinjitiwaabik Zaaging Anishinaabek First Nation Reserve. The film ''

Coconut Hero ''Coconut Hero'' is a German-Canadian comedy film directed by Florian Cossen and released in 2015. Coconut Hero premiered on March 18, 2015 at the Carlton Cinema in Toronto where it screened for two consecutive weeks. Following its premiere, on ...

'' was also filmed partially in Geraldton.

Notable people

* Boris Elik,

National Hockey League The National Hockey League (NHL; french: Ligue nationale de hockey—LNH, ) is a professional ice hockey league in North America comprising 32 teams—25 in the United States and 7 in Canada. It is considered to be the top ranked professional ...

(NHL) hockey player * John Grisdale, NHL hockey player * James Hendry, soldier and recipient of the

George Cross The George Cross (GC) is the highest award bestowed by the British government for non-operational gallantry or gallantry not in the presence of an enemy. In the British honours system, the George Cross, since its introduction in 1940, has been ...

Roy Thomas Roy William Thomas Jr."Roy Thomas Checklist" ''Alter Ego'' vol. 3, #50 (July 2005) p. 16 (born November 22, 1940) is an American comic book writer and editor, who was Stan Lee's first successor as editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics. He is possibl ...

, painter *

Jane Urquhart Jane Urquhart, LL.D (born June 21, 1949) is a Canadian novelist and poet. She is the internationally acclaimed author of seven award-winning novels, three books of poetry and numerous short stories. As a novelist, Urquhart is well known for her e ...

, novelist *

Kelsey Wilson Kelsey Wilson (born January 22, 1986) is a retired Canadian professional ice hockey player. On October 6, 2006, Wilson was signed as a free agent by the Nashville Predators, and on May 17, 2010, he was re-signed by Predators to a further one-yea ...

, NHL hockey player * Tyler Tucker, NHL hockey player

References

External links

* {{Authority control Municipalities in Thunder Bay District Single-tier municipalities in Ontario