A Flin Flon road that never was, never will be.
City council voted last week to officially close part of McSheffrey Avenue, located between Boam and Adams streets, having sold it to a homeowner who wanted to build a garage on the land.
While there is a wide, unpaved path marking where McSheffrey Avenue would have gone, the road was never formally
established.
“This is just a road that never existed that was in our municipal maps,” said Coun. Bill Hanson, who introduced the motion, which must still pass a final reading.
Hanson said McSheffrey Avenue was originally going to stretch from Boam Street near the Ross Lake Cemetery up to Adams Street near the apartment complex.
“The road was never put in and there’s no need to put in that road,” he said.
McSheffrey Avenue was named after Peter McSheffrey, who was mayor of Flin Flon in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Prior to that, he was a member of Flin Flon’s first town council from 1933 to 1936.
It is believed the unrealized plans for McSheffrey Avenue date back to his time as mayor.
Mark Kolt, chief administrative officer for the city, said the story is that McSheffrey was “a firebrand leftist” who was not exactly universally loved.
“It may be a sort of in joke [by] all the people who were naming the street after him, because it was unlikely to ever be developed,” added Kolt.
There may be something to that as McSheffrey is the only early mayor of Flin Flon who does not have a street, bridge or park named in his
honour.
According to the book Flin Flon, McSheffrey’s “political ideas often bordered on the socialistic,” causing him to clash with one of his colleagues, the more conservative George Mainwaring.
The book describes McSheffrey, who worked in the mechanical department at HBMS (now Hudbay) as “a spirited Scot, a man whose pretentious style of speech and writing tended to chafe his fellow workers and nettle the townspeople.”
