General Archives | The birth of Rouyn and Noranda: a mining story

Interview with former Horne smelter foreman Rodolphe Cloutier.

Rodolphe Cloutier: “To heat ores, the smelter previously used coal and oil. They stopped doing that when gas arrived here in town. The smelter then started to be gas-fired. […]

The Itinerary Followed by Edmund Horne to Get to the Rouyn Township

There are 180 kilometres separating Angliers village from Rouyn township. Edmund Horne made the trip by boat on several occasions and with several assistants between 1911 and 1922.

The Wright Mine at the End of the Nineteenth Century

After Mr. Edward Wright sold his deposit to New York’s Mattawa Mining and Smelting in 1889, numerous buildings were built in the vicinity of the Wright mine such as […]

A Wright Mine Headframe

This headframe sat on a 60-foot-deep mine shaft, for which the drilling started at the end of 1880. It was finally destroyed in the winter months between 1977 […]

A Wright Mine Building

It took until the summer of 1889 for a road connecting the Wright mine to the Duhamel and Guigues townships to be built.

Prospectors Setting up Camp

Given that the work of prospectors was most often done far away from any other settlement, they often had to live in the wild for many weeks on […]

Equipment Used by Prospectors

Given that prospectors must live far away from areas of settlement for weeks on out, they needed a lot of material. But because of the remoteness and the […]

Prospecting in the Rouyn Township

Interviewer: Mr. Hambry arrived in Rouyn in 1923. He said that there was close to 100 prospectors on the site. Even today at the age of 75 he […]

A Painting Based on the Legendary Picture of Edmund Horne

This painting demonstrates how the famous prospector still lives in Rouyn-Norandians’ collective memory. The sister-cities named the mine and the smelter after Edmund Horne, as well as an […]

Prospector Edmund Henry Horne

In 1996, Edmund Horne was inducted into the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame.

A Now-legendary Picture of Prospector Edmund Horne on a Canoe

When Edmund Horne prospected in the Rouyn township in the 1910s and in the beginning of the 1920s, there were neither roads nor railroads. The only way to […]

An Aerial Photograph of the Rouyn Mining Village in 1926.

At the time of this photograph, in the summer of 1926, Rouyn’s mining community had just been incorporated into a village municipality. You can see that the many […]