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.
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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
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