Interview With Carole St-Jarre

Carole St-Jarre speaks about company villages.

Mrs. Carole St-Jarre: “Gold Fields Mines, that was further away. There was the road going in to Gold Fields which was about, I would say, a kilometer or two. From the main road. To the left, a road that led to the houses. They had a shop as you came up. It was the miners’ shop. For clothes, boots, those sorts of things. It was a bit of a general store. There was also the post office: Halet. For a while, it was my father who would take the mail bags to the Gold Fields and East [Malartic] shops. Mail would arrive in Malartic. It used to come in the old post office for the first few years and then it would arrive in the new post office. He’d pick it up and he’d take it to the two villages. The village of Gold Fields, I don’t remember that much. All the houses were the same, like in the mining villages. When we went to Ontario, we would go through Kirkland Lake, Larder Lake and Virginia Town, and all that. You could see it was the same darn thing. The same white houses with little gables, four or two sides. And the manager’s house, or the director’s house, really stood out. It was taller and far larger than the others.”