Virginiatown: Kerr-Addison Mines

The Virginiatown area (between Larder Lake and Kirkland Lake) is basically in the centre of the Abitibi Greenstone Belt, famous for it's wealth of ore. Ontario's first gold rush in 1906 happened here as prospectors, excited over Cobalt's silver boom, began looking for more, but found gold on the shore of Larder Lake instead. This became the Kerr-Addison mine. In fact, the gold for the first Canadian-minted $5 gold piece in 1909 came from Kerr-Addison. By the 1950's, Kerr-Addison had become the biggest gold mine in the country with over 2,000 employees. Sadly, though, by the 1990s, the town of Viginiatown was buried in debt, as the bonanza of 10 million ounces of gold went down south with the investors. The community was forced in the early 1990s to shut the mine over failure to pay taxes.

As children, though, we used to get quite excited on our weekend excursions, about the town with the "pink smoke".