Mining and metallurgy legacy project

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Though we can learn a lot about an artifact by using our five senses to engage with it and by conducting archival, material culture, or oral
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history research there are always gaps in our knowledge.
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Aspects of the artifact reside in the imagination or in cultural or collective memory.
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Some stories are grounded in the ways through which they have been passed along and some stories are grounded
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in the in-between spaces that form between a person and an artifact.
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This door embodies over 100 years of multi-generational mining history in the Abitibi Gold Belt.
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Made in the early years of mining operations (c. 1910-1915), the door is a site of inscription:
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we can see marks of the makers, for example the metal was likely made by local blacksmiths,
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and the marks of use, for example a dent that shows where the door may have been kicked, possibly in an emergency.
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The door came to Ingenium in 2018.
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It was past midnight and -39 degrees, when I landed in Timmins on Feb. 5, 2018, but I was excited to be there.
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Gold Corp gave me permission to visit the Dome Mine on the very last day, before it closed after 108 years of continues operations.
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I was there to select mining artifacts for the national collection.
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A few miners, who wanted the last walk through the drifts, joined me.
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We walked slowly underground, they told me stories, and I tagged artifacts.
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And then someone remembered the door.
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The door was upstairs, in a warehouse, and when I saw it, I thought
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to myself: “This is an artifact every curator dreams of.”
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It is, metaphorically, the history of the 20th century as seen by the miners in Timmins, Ontario.
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Once in our care, Ingenium curators and conservators were determined to learn more about the door and
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about the inscriptions upon it.
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We brought the door to the Canadian Conservation Institute to scan it.
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The infrared and ultra violet fluorescence revealed more inscriptions than are visible to the eye: the oldest dates to 1910.
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However, though we were able to use technology to discover more about the mining door, our curiosity about the people
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who wrote on the door persisted.
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We imagined who they were and wondered about their lives at the mine.
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When Anna shared her story of the Dome Mine door and its many inscriptions with me, I thought this would be a
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perfect opportunity to explore how objects tell stories with my graduate seminar on Narrativity and Performance in Public History.
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Each student was randomly assigned an inscription and tasked with researching and coming up with a backstory
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for the person who wrote it.
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Creating a script, they then performed it.
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The aim was not only to animate the inscription but to create an imagined scenario of its making.
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Doing history in this way allows us to explore how one might capture something authentic about the past in the absence of
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direct evidence, such as the interviews with the miners who wrote those words on the door.
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Performance-based strategies such as this encourages historians to think through the relationship between accuracy
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and authenticity, between lived experiences and the stories we tell about them, between history and memory.
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While these stories are fictional, they are grounded in research and on the object itself.
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Connected to something that really happened, the students created what we might call “storied realities” about
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the door and what it can tell us about life and work at the mine.
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The evocation of contexts and world produced during the Carleton University Public History MA students’ monologues
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gives us interesting insight that material culture analysis would not have been able to convey on its own,
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even though to this day we are unsure as to why or how something rose to the level of being inscribed on the door.
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In this first story, Emma Gillies explores the mindset of a miner who felt compelled to inscribe major world events onto the mining door:
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Bill asked me why I’d taken to writing down big events on the mine door.
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“Who’s gonna see that stuff down here, anyway?” He said.
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I couldn’t tell you, but this morning I noticed for the first time in a long time that back in ’63 I’d scribbled down when JFK was killed.
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I can’t remember what made me think to do that, like Bill said, who’s gonna see it?
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But then I thought, well, with everything that happened yesterday, maybe I should keep going.
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I still can’t believe they’d shoot Martin Luther King Jr.
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I don’t get it, him being peaceful and everything.
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And I understand what he was about I think.
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I mean, he was just trying to organize those garbage workers so they could get better pay
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my wife tells me to call them sanitation employees, more proper, she says, I told her in that case she better call me a goldsmith
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anyway, if there’s one thing I get its wanting honest pay in return for honest work.
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Anyway, it’s funny, I wrote the King stuff down on my way through the doors, but then on my way out for the day I had this thought that
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maybe I should slap Pearson’s retirement on there too.
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I mean, he said he was stepping down back in December, but yesterday was the start of the Liberal Convention and
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it was all made official.
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Lester B. Pearson a pretty good guy I think.
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And I got this feeling that him stepping down, it’s gonna be something we remember.
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Well, wherever things are headed, as long as this mine’s got gold, we’ll be okay here.
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But not all of the moments inscribed on the door rose to the level of world significance as Kate Jordan’s story demonstrates:
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Oh, Oscar! Oh God yeah, Oscar, oh yeah, yeah yeah, yeah. No, of course, yeah, Oscar, yeah, yeah. No, he didn’t really go by Fred, no.
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Ya heard that one? Oh, that’s a… that’s a good one, that’s a good one! Oh God, yeah!
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Okay, well Fred… Fred he was from Toronto, you know?
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Well, no… He wasn’t from Toronto, he was from Denmark…
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But you know, he moved to Toronto, ’cause he was looking for adventure, you know… So, uh…
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So he shows up in Toronto, and he doesn’t find adventure, instead he ends up living with his aunt.
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So, you know, uhh… It’s a little too close for uh… For Oscar’s taste, so he decides to come up here, eh, and um…
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You know, it’s hard when you first start out, eh? It’s… It’s tough ’cause, you know, you’ve got a lot of time, right? All this time to think and…
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You know, he’s missing the family. He’s missing the meals.
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And he’s really missing the sausages! You know, we’ve got sausages here, right? Like, Daley’s has got sausages. They got Polish, and uh…
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Well, I only buy Polish, so uh…
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Anyway, but he walks in, first day, and he asks for these sausages! They’ve got some kinda crazy Danish name.
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Lady behind the counter has no clue what he’s talking about, right? Just like, no idea!
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She just stares at him, goes home and tells her husband of course!
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End of the day, everyone in Timmins knows that Fred is coming to this Daley’s expecting it to be some kind of fancy, fine food, Toronto store.
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So all the boys start chirping him about this, right?
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Like, one guy, I forget who? He decides to call him “Oscar Meyer”, you know like Oscar Meyer wieners.
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Like you know… “If I were an Oscar Meyer wiener…” Anyway…
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Yeah, so lucky for him that’s the one that sticks.
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Yeah, Fred never did figure out how to get those sausages up there. So, he learns how to start making them, right?
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He buys some guy’s sausage grinder. He bringing in these amazing sausages. Until one day, when his sausage grinder breaks!
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You know, he shows up and he hasn’t go these sausages and he’s choking back the food, right?
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But it’s okay ’cause they haven’t served him baloney steaks yet!
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But… Sure enough, Friday comes around. The one thing Fred can’t abide is these baloney steaks!
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So he gets up, that’s it, he goes – I says “I’m leaving, I’m getting right out of here! I’m on strike! Union be damned!”
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So he just walks right out of there.
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Sometimes the inscriptions bring the macro and micro scales of global politics and daily life at the mine together
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as conveyed by Nick Leckie’s monologue.
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OK, from the top…
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I’d put in, what I’d guess… 4-6 hours of overtime in the main, with my buddy Mario.
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As usual, we didn’t talk much to each other during the shift.
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So, at the break, most of us went up to the surface; breathe the fresh air, talk a bit, light up
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Of course, it took longer to go up, that’s for sure, but my father always told me that he regretted not doing it more often.
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It was a lot harder to leave the Dome in his day, but his lungs still trouble him
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The shift boss let us have a little radio in the smokers’ corner, for the news, because Le Journal and Le Droit were always late in ’68.
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You think that blowing up bombs in mailboxes will save a nation?
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That killing a Black preacher will bring eternal peace?
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Seems to me that to have civil rights, you have to be civil, right?
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It’s a shame we have to use violence to get across what we mean.
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As Kennedy said about King, “… replace that violence (…) with an effort to understand with compassion and love.”
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That’s why it was so hard to believe that someone shot RFK.
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And then, even after he was shot, his first words were asking about others around him.
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What a guy!
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That’s why I decided to write his name on the doors, next to MLK’s.
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To remember their words, and their lessons.
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Yeah, I would say ’68 was a crazy year, because even here at “Porcupine” you could feel the loss.
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In our final monologue, Max Cronkite’s tells the story of how change can be technological as well as political.
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God damnit.
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Did you know that Earl and Pearson got laid off today?
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Just found out this morning.
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That must be over 30 in the past month or so.
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The gold standard has been dropping and all the Timmins mines aren’t doing so well.
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So, you know what head office decides to go and do?
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Computerize!
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They bring in these new machines that track how many hours we work, no more punch cards anymore
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I’m going to miss that *chunk* sound they make.
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Now what do I have to look forward to!? Ridiculous.
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And then I get to thinking, what’s next?
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Are we going to replace the fuse box with the locks on it with a computer?
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What happens when it miss-calculates one of us and lets an explosion go off when we’re down there?
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Who knows, maybe all miners will be machines in the next 10 years.
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God I am going to miss that *chunk*, it’s what I look forward to, you know?
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Every morning, every evening.
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The mine is perfectly fine the way it is.
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I know I’m probably overreacting but if I can’t see my card, use my card, hear that *chunk* then I don’t know what I’m in control of.
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God help me, everything will be a computer.
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I guess it’s a changing world, but only God knows if we’ll be the better for it.
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These four performances breathe life into the inscriptions and evoke grounded yet imagined contexts for the emotion
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that underpins the writing.
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The decades’ worth of inscriptions appear to us today as a palimpsestic, or layers of text upon text, or as a modern-day
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medieval chronical, where all events from the first snow to a political assassination are weighted equally.
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This way of recording events challenges conventional notions of writing and understanding history, which favours major events
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or everyday life but rarely move between the scales.