Remembering our past

The Municipal Heritage Committee and the City of North Bay is on a mission to celebrate, remember, and get people talking about the city’s history.

On Thursday, the committee gathered with their community partners at the Ferguson Block Parkette (corner of Fraser and Main) to unveil the first five Heritage Site Plaques.

“We wanted the people to know that this is what was here in the city’s founding years,” says Municipal Heritage Committee Chair Peter Handley describing the Ferguson Block plaque.

The first series of plaques are located within the downtown core and feature a brief story and several historical photographs of each site.

The five sites include:

- The North Bay Courthouse

- The Ferguson Block

- The Old Town Hall

- CPR Yards

- The Royal Theatre

Handley says the plaques share a story about a building or streetscape that no longer exists and that the committee hopes to put in several more this coming year.

“There’s five up now and we are hoping to do three this year and then depending on the largess of the city we’ll continue.”

“It’s an ongoing program. We’ve lost a lot of buildings, we’ve lost Ferguson’s original home, we’ve lost the original post office all sorts of stuff.”

“And again we are trying to remind people of what was there. The Royal Theatre is different, but the Royal Theatre is still there but it’s changed it’s not the Royal Theatre anymore, so we try to bring back the time of romance of the time of the Royal Theatre during the Second World War and so forth.”

Handley credits the city for cooperating and jumping on board with the project which enabled the committee to do more than originally planned.


“They’ve not only created a walking tour involving these five (plaques) plus the various buildings we’ve plaqued with Heritage Site plaques (glass ones), they’re taking it a step further and they are going to make it an interactive web page. So that you can visit downtown North Bay and historic sites just through your computer and then decide oh I’d like to go and visit that.”

“We were going to do one of these sites a year that was our plan … one that’s all we could afford, but Jerry (Knox) and the crew stepped in and said try five.”

Handley says it is time to educate and enlightened the community about what has helped shaped the city they live in.


“Look we don’t have a huge romantic background as a community, we’re not one of the cities with (who had) gave birth to three prime ministers and who had a war and rebellion and armed revolution, we’re a quiet northern Ontario community and we’ve got to hang on to the heritage and history parts of what we had … we haven’t been doing that.”

“This committee was created to try and stop the bleeding away (the abusing) of our heritage buildings,” he explains.

“We can tell people what a building has meant to the downtown, what a building has meant to the community, and the more we can do in that regard the more of our background of our heritage we’ll save.”

Handley also notes that there is no written criteria for the designation and the committee has vetted sites on knowledge. He says they were provided a list from the museum and have been working from there.

“Some were logical the Courthouse, Ferguson Building, the CPR Yards and so forth,” he explains.

“It’s a site that is unique, it’s gone tat was an early building in the history of North Bay … I don’t know we’re making it up as we go along there’s no hard and fast rules."