The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.
To order a copy of “From Meteorite Impact to Constellation City”, please click here: http://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Catalog/saarinen-meteorite.shtml
In 1980, a disgruntled person who had moved from Sudbury to Edmonton, Alta., published a long piece in the Edmonton Journal proclaiming the demise of the city he had left and ranting at length about its problems.
Yet, 30 years later, despite a mess at city hall — though not matched by the Ford brothers show in Toronto or rotation of mayors in Montreal — and crumbling infrastructure as everywhere, Sudbury seems to be more than surviving. With every passing year it becomes a more attractive place to live due to its physical setting among lakes, its increasingly diversified economy (research institutes, medical school) and the limited stresses of a mid-sized regional service centre.
The lengthy book under review, Oiva W. Saarinen’s From Meteorite Impact to Constellation City: A Historical Geography of Greater Sudbury, is the most comprehensive account of Sudbury’s past published to date and helps to explain its survival despite the many odds aligned against it. The author underscores the importance of space and place to understanding the city’s long-term development and its continued difficulties. Specifically, he highlights the lack of a solid tax base combined with a legal requirement to provide urban amenities over a huge area (imposed by various Ontario governments, but especially that of Mike Harris).
The concept of constellation city is an appropriate metaphor, though the outlying communities, most of which were once independent entities, do not like the idea of Sudbury’s core being the main star. Where the concept came from is not clearly identified in the text, but it fits the city very well, given Sudbury was once ringed by mining camps, company towns and agricultural villages, that have been amalgamated.
The book is very ambitious. It seeks to cover the region’s physical origins millions of years ago, the geological and geographic alterations thousands of years ago, the archeological record of first human settlements hundreds of years ago, and the significant surveys that provided reference points for a rugged, rocky, forested terrain in the 1850s (50 of 300 pages). That defining or mapping took place before the railway expanded lumbering and village life.
After this lengthy background, the author gets down to presenting the actual town’s development. Some of the story will be familiar, especially to readers of Sudbury: Railtown to Regional Capital (edited by Carl Wallace and Ashley Thompson in 1993), but Saarinen casts the material in a very different pattern to highlight a constellation city.
The chapter headings reveal part of his overlapping approach and extensive coverage: The Unfolding of the Natural Landscape; The Aboriginal/ Colonial Frontier; Drawing Lines on the Map; Forging of a Local Monopoly: From
Prospectors and Speculators to the International Nickel Company (1883-1902); Sudbury (1883-1939); Copper Cliff (1886-1939); From Local to Global Monopoly: The Merging of Inco and Mond (1902-1928); Beyond Sudbury and Copper Cliff: Railway Stations, Mining Camps, Smelter Sites, and Company Towns; Beyond Sudbury and Copper Cliff: Forestry, Agriculture, Indian Reserves, and the Burwash Industrial Farm; From Falconbridge Nickel and Inco to Xstrata Nickel and Vale Canada (1928-2012); From Company Town Setting to Regional Constellation (1939-1973); From Regional Constellation to Greater Sudbury (1973-2001+); A Union Town?; Healing the Landscape; and Beyond a Rock and a Hard Place. Appendices, notes on sources, bibliography and index complete the volume; the list of consulted sources is impressive.
Many important findings, interesting biographies and valuable opinions are offered. Only a few examples will be highlighted. In recounting the history of Inco, Saarinen begins with the prospectors and points out that no great rush existed when the deposits of nickel-copper were discovered. “Only a handful of dreamers expected more from Sudbury than the echo of train whistles and smell of sawdust.”(50) Small operators could not obtain the financing needed for the technology involved in smelting ores and Saarinen outlines how the Canadian Copper Company came to dominate early mining and processing.
He also notes the infamous heap roasting that began in 1888 and tied Sudbury’s image to “clouds of sulphurous acid gas and environmental degradation” (60). The importance of the land grants to the CPR, and then the Jesuits, is shown to have determined much of the town’s central geographical pattern of development, the other factors being the lakes and rock outcrop-pings. In this part of the book the maps (65, 66, 67) are very good; unfortunately in some instances, the explanatory type is very small and makes for difficult reading.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://www.thesudburystar.com/2013/09/30/from-big-bang-to-no-wimper-a-historical-book-review