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The area that became the Town of Copper Cliff (west of Sudbury proper and now a part of the City of Greater Sudbury) was a swampy, rocky, forbidding mess when prospectors arrived with John A. Macdonald’s railway in the late 19th century. Soon they discovered copper and nickel ores and started mining. While the exploitation of the area’s rich mineral resources slowly brought in the capital that drove the development of the area, it did the landscape no favours at all; Copper Cliff was now stark and barren in addition to rocky and forbidding.
This was the unforgiving setting that in turn shaped the people who came to inhabit it. Early citizens of Copper Cliff came from all over the world: the United Kingdom, Finland, Italy, the Ukraine, Austria, France, and numerous other countries. There were many differences between these people – cultural, social and economic differences exacerbated by the policies of the Canadian Copper Company, the mining giant that literally owned the town for the better part of a century.
What the residents of Copper Cliff had in common despite all that divided them was a powerful strength of spirit that allowed them to survive and, later, to thrive as individuals and as a community.
During the First and Second World Wars a number of the Cliff’s citizens went forth to defend the ideals of democracy and freedom, while many more stayed, to provide support on the home front by working underground in the mines, by raising funds, by collecting salvageable materials, or by knitting desperately-needed socks.
This exhibition tells of Copper Cliff’s early development and of the town’s involvement in the First and Second World Wars through photographs, objects, and the stories of those individuals whose strength of spirit led them to give so much of themselves.
