Pagwa River is a

community A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, tow ...

in the

Cochrane District Cochrane District is a district and Census divisions of Canada, census division in Northeastern Ontario in the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Ontario. It was created in 1921 from parts of Timiskaming District, Timiskami ...

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 ...

. It is a part of Cochrane, Unorganized, North Part in Canadian census data.

History

It was named a railway

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 ...

because of its major junction of the railway and the Pagwachuan River. Here, it supported a fur trading post. Packet steamers ran between Pagwa and James Bay to serve the Revillon Freres trading post and community early in the 1900s. Pagwa then became the site of an airfield and airforce base of 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. ...

Distant Early Warning system, which was decommissioned in 1968. From 1952 to after 1962, this station was operated by the

United States Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the air service branch of the United States Armed Forces, and is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Originally created on 1 August 1907, as a part of the United States Army Signal ...

913th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron The 913th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron is an inactive United States Air Force unit. It was last assigned to the Sault Sainte Marie Air Defense Sector, Air Defense Command, stationed at Pagwa Air Station, Ontario, Canada. It was inactivat ...

. In its heyday, Pagwa was busy with commercial activity. Goods transported by rail to Pagwa for the Trade Post were unloaded from boxcars onto a long wooden chute that slid the goods downhill to the doorstep of the Post. Each year large wooden barges were constructed at Pagwa to float goods by steamer to villages along the Kenogami and Albany Rivers as far as Ogoki and Fort Albany. The barges were built from douglas-fir timbers brought from British Columbia by rail (R. Ferris, 2010). The tracks and the top surface sheathing of the railway bridge are presently removed. The bridge was last used by Thunderhouse Forest Services Inc as access for a treeplanting operation on the west side of the Pagwachuan River in 2006. The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Geraldton Area Office, blocked use of the bridge later that year. Commercial activity and population began declining after the

Trans-Canada Highway The Trans-Canada Highway ( French: ; abbreviated as the TCH or T-Can) is a transcontinental federal–provincial highway system that travels through all ten provinces of Canada, from the Pacific Ocean on the west coast to the Atlantic Ocean o ...

opened up the region post World War II. Some of the original townsite has been purchased. Today, there are a few private cottages and seasonal homes, mostly owned by residents of Constance Lake First Nation and Hearst, Ontario. Some residents of Constance Lake today were born at Pagwa and spent many years of their lives there.

References

{{authority control Communities in Cochrane District