Don Arril, Interview 2006

 

JENNIFER MCCAULEY INTERVIEWS 2006

 Transcription from audio Interview

Nipigon Historical Museum  Grant

September 6, 2006

Don Arril

Resident of Nipigon

“I grew up in Port Arthur which is now called Thunder Bay and I worked at Woodside Brothers as a machinist apprentice.

In 1955 I moved to Red Rock as a mill wright and I got married.  Then in 1968 I went to work of Ontario Hydro at Cameron Falls, and I am still here as a mechanic for Hydro.

I now work at Founder’s Museum in Thunder Bay, not because I don’t like this place but I like old machinery and they have building full of old machinery up there and nobody to work on them. So I go up there one day a week and try to get their machinery running for them.  They have a couple of little railway speeders like the putt putts but there isn’t enough track and things could get out of control.  There is a train there I worked on and it’s from 1910 and I worked on that for a few weeks and got it running and it works good now.

I lived out at Cameron Falls from 1968 to 1972 and then we moved into Nipigon.  There were about fifty houses there and I think 30 of them were moved into Nipigon and the rest they sold of tore them down. 

The town wasn’t that much different than what it is now (2006 -BB), the Plywood Mill was here already and two grocery stores.  Saunders store was here but it closed down and then he moved over to Red Rock which is run by his son.  There were more hotels bust other than that it’s pretty much the same. The curling rink was built in the mid 70’s because it wasn’t there when I moved here in 1972-73 so it was a few years after that.

In the old days Cameron Falls was a pretty busy place, they had at one time a store and a Post Office, a community hall and they had T.V. Cable set up.  At the height of Cameron Falls there was probably 700 people because,  like I say,  there were at least 50 houses. At one time they had a school and I think by the time my kids grew up they had bussed the kids.  We bought the house we had at Cameron Falls.

The railway wasn’t working when I lived there (it was a long time before we came). We used to go hunting and we walked up the old railway which ran all the way to South Bay.(This would be the Tramway that Don is talking about that closed circa 1910 –BB)  There are places up the Frasier Lake Road you could see the old railway still.

At Cameron, when I was a mechanic there, we had a crew of about 25 people and there were three plants; Alexander, Cameron and Pine Portage, and we did all the maintenance including major overhauls.

An overhaul was a pretty big job, it would take two to three months approximately.  We also went to Terrace Bay and looked after the Hydro plant down there.  At one time Virgin Falls was used as a dam they used to control the water level of Lake Nipigon which controlled the flow of water to Cameron Falls and the Alexander Plant and I think, when they built Pine Portage they blew the middle of it (Virgin) and they diverted water from some of the rivers up north into Lake Nipigon to get more water flowing down the Nipigon River.

We worked on the hydro electric turbines and generators and we made most of our own parts.  I was basically a heavy equipment mechanic and the plant that was at Terrace Bay – they had also diverted water there from some of the rivers up north.  The Kenogami River normally ran north eventually into James Bay and they had to make a diversion channel from there and they ran some of the water into Longlac and some into Lake Superior. It’s a little harder to do things like that now  with all the environmental protection.

At that time there were probably about a dozen workers at the plants and they would have eight hour shifts.  The river drive came down too and there were sluices at each plant.  When I worked at Cameron there were a few of the workers who lived in Nipigon and traveled back and forth to work from there.  They also had a bus from Nipigon to Cameron Falls which I drove for many years.  I think now at the plant they work four ten hour shifts since I left there in 1993.

Gerry Brennan worked with me up there who was also Reeve of Nipigon, was a district mechanic foreman.  And there was a Nick Usala and an Andy Davidson was under him (Gerry) and Ted Nyman and Russ Walker. There’s still a few around Nipigon yet – there was Ron Larson, who just passed away about a year or so ago – he was our rigger and also our mechanic.

I liked working out there and I liked living out there, too, we were in the bush all the time.  My kids grew up here, they were about six and eight when we moved into Nipigon.

My brother and I both built camps beside each other out at Jackpine.  We built our camps in 1965 and I think we paid $375.00 for the lot out there which at that time wasn’t much because it’s Crown Land and every so many years they’d open up new lots – there are twenty lots there now. Now they go for around $50,000.

On the Nipigon River I remember when I moved into town they were still using the sluices at the plant and we had some maintenance work to do on the machinery for it.  There was a sluice at each plant and there were log booms here in Nipigon the logs would come down the river and then they’d catch them in booms.  I guess some wood went to Thunder Bay, but I don’t know too much about that.

My wife, Leona, stayed home with the kids and they turned out good.

In Nipigon for fun we mainly spent our time out at our camp and we went boating and fishing and a lot of moose  and bird hunting because we like being in the bush  - that was the great thing about being in Cameron Falls.

Burt Douglas was a Reeve of Nipigon for a while and he was also Chief Operator at Cameron Falls.

END

Don included a letter from Elinor (?) (I am thinking Elinor Barr- BB)

…Thank you also for the info and photos about the Old CPR Cemetery in Nipigon. The stone marker is for a Swede, as you probably guessed, Per Rubert Burstrom from Northern Sweden. He was only 31 when he died leaving a wife and little girl.  I found his death noted in the record of Zion Lutheran Church, Fort William.  He is listed as Rybert, but everyone called him Charlie.  The story is that it was a mining accident, an explosion, that killed him and blinded his brother Gottfred.  Gottfred went on to buy the Kimberly Hotel in Port Arthur, and ran it himself.  They say that he could tell the denomination of any bill just by the feel of it, and nobody could cheat him because of this.  Another brother Oscar, owned the Vendome Hotel.