Porcupine Gold Rush
A gold rush that began during the summer of 1909 turned the area around Porcupine Lake into a booming community. Two prospectors working in Northern Ontario didn’t have to dig deep to make one of the first highly lucrative gold discoveries. One of the prospectors reported that his partner “was pulling moss off the rocks a few feet away, when suddenly he let a roar out of him. … The quartz, where he had taken off the moss, looked as though someone had dripped a candle along it, but instead of wax it was gold. The quartz stood up about 3 feet out of the ground and was about 6 feet wide with gold all splattered over it for about 60 feet along the vein.” The Porcupine mines developed from these early discoveries and supported a robust economy throughout the Great Depression and into the late 1950s.