Going Home Again as Kirkland Lake Celebrates 100 Years

Rosemary Ganley
The Peterborough Examiner
July 17, 2019

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"Home is the place where/if you have to go there/they have to take you in."

Robert Frost was a wise American poet, but in the case of my visit to my hometown Kirkland Lake two weeks ago to celebrate its 100th anniversary, this insight didn't hold true. Five days with my sister, surrounded by longtime friends and schoolmates, were rich in memory and gratitude.

Kirkland Lake was founded in 1919, a hard-scrabble gold mining camp full of prospectors, odd characters and muddy roads. It gradually acquired a police officer, a hospital, a school and, of course, a hockey rink.

It was also the site of many deaths of miners in cave-ins and rock falls, a very heavy toll: almost 300 men in the years from 1914 to 2015. There is a striking black granite memorial sculpture to these men. There was no union in the early days. A famous strike in the bitter winter of 1941 didn't produce one (until 1944).

The "Mile of Gold" was seven gold mines strung in an east-west row. It is estimated today that 42 million ounces of gold came out of these mines between 1919 and 2012, worth $60 billion in today's dollars. Even with mining's downside, that's a lot of nation-building.
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