The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
A dusty pH balance meter. A laboratory ore scale. Miniature replicas of long-demolished head frames. These are among the history-preserving items on display at the newly unveiled Hudbay room of the Flin Flon Station Museum. 'I really want to thank the museum board for allowing us and helping us to be able to showcase some of our history,' Cal Huntley, a Hudbay official, said at the official opening of the room last weekend. The room, located at the west end of the museum, vividly showcases the early years of HBM&S, the now-defunct subsidiary of Hudbay. It features black and white photos, original documents and maps along with pieces of equipment that aided HBM&S operations _ and the economy of Flin Flon _ so many decades ago. 'We're very happy to have the new Hudbay archives,' said Lois (Bunny) Burke, secretary-treasurer of the museum. 'It's going to be a big addition to the community.' For Burke, a highlight is a wall-sized group photo of the miners who made up HBM&S's underground night shift in 1938. 'I'm really intrigued by (it),' she said. 'I was hoping my dad would be one of them, but he was a few years too late for that. I think it's a great thing for the children of former employees.' The surprisingly sharp photo depicts 87 men, wearing flashlight-topped hard hats and sturdy boots, posing in front of the company plant. An accompanying listing identifies each miner along with his birthplace and prior community of residence. The list includes birthplaces like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria and England. Prior to coming to Flin Flon, the men had lived in locations such as Prince Albert, Quebec, The Pas and various communities in B.C. Among them is Dan Kolesar, a Czech who came to Flin Flon through Yorkton; Alex Krokosz, a Polish man previously employed in Winnipeg; and Maurice Barbe, a Frenchman (France, not Quebec) who had been in Brandon. They are among the 46,000-plus people who have worked at Hudbay's local operations since inception in 1927. 'And you tie that in with families, that's a large number of people and places that have been represented here,' Huntley said. 'And we're well known everywhere across Canada. It's hard to go anywhere and not run into somebody that hasn't had a cousin or an aunt or an uncle that's worked at Hudbay.' Another fascinating artifact is a desktop-sized curling trophy, carved from a slab of copper, that HBM&S produced in its early days. It is a model of the company operations at the time. Huntley noted that the plan is to change, from time to time, the contents of the room to highlight different periods of Hudbay's history. 'We'll do that in concert with the museum board,' he said. See 'Hopes' on pg. Continued from pg. There is also hope, Burke said, of eventually giving each past and present Flin Flon and area mine its own exhibit. 'There have been 26 mines around Flin Flon,' she noted. The Hudbay room is the result of a $150,000 donation the company made to the museums in Flin Flon and Snow Lake last year. 'We do have some dollars, which certainly helps in making the displays the way they are,' said Burke. In Snow Lake, similar work is ongoing to preserve that community's rich mining history. For the Flin Flon Station Museum, Burke hopes that the Hudbay room will bolster local interest. 'There's a lot of people in Flin Flon who have never been in the museum,' she said.
