Espanola, Ontario
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Espanola (2001 census population 5,449) is a town in Northern Ontario, Canada. It is situated on the Spanish River, in the Sudbury District, approximately 70 kilometres west of the city of Sudbury, and just south of the junction of Highway 6 and Highway 17.
The name "Espanola" has been attributed to a story which dates back to the mid 18th century. The story goes that the area's Ojibwa tribe sent a raiding party a long distance to the south and brought back with them a white woman who spoke Spanish. The woman married a local brave of a family living near the mouth of the river and taught her children to speak Spanish. Later, when the French Voyageurs came upon the settlement and heard fragments of Spanish spoken by the local natives, they remarked "Espagnole", which had been later anglicized to "Espanola", and the river was named the Spanish River.
The town was founded in the early 1900s as a company town for the employees of the Spanish River Pulp and Paper company, which opened a paper mill there. The town expaned quickly, with a hotel, school, theatre and a bustling company town.
On January 17, 1910, a Canadian Pacific Railway passenger train derailed off a trestle just outside of Espanola. Seventy people died from the railcar's 27-foot plunge into the icy water of the Spanish River. It was the one of the CPR's worst accidents.
In 1929, the mill was closed due to the Great Depression, and Espanola became a ghost town until the Second World War, when the mill site became a camp for German prisoners of war. In 1946, the paper mill was reopened by the Kalamazoo Vegetable Parchment Company, producing specialty kraft paper.
The town was independently incorporated on March 1, 1958.
In 1969, the KVP operation was sold to E.B. Eddy, who operated the mill until 1999. Now owned by Domtar, it continues to be one of the town's largest employers.
Espanola got some bad press in the early 1980s when the mill accidentally discharged toxic effluent into the Spanish River, killing fish by the thousands. The spill acted like a "flush", and when the fish came back a few years later, they were untainted and thriving. Now the mill has one of the most stringent "zero-emissions" pulp bleaching processes in the world, and the area below the Spanish River Dam is an excellent spot for pickerel fishing.
The 1960s Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series Adventures in Rainbow Country was filmed near Espanola, in the small native community of Birch Island. The series starred Lois Maxwell, the actress who played "Ms. Moneypenny" in Bond films such as Dr. No and Goldfinger. She lived in Espanola for 18 years.
Reference
- Espanola on the Spanish, by George R. Morrison (1989)
External link
- Website (http://www.town.espanola.on.ca/index.htm)