By: Rebecca Dolgoy
Ingenium – Canada's Museums of Science and Innovation
A door to the past: Inscriptions offer a glimpse into Canada’s mining history
Photo Credit
Pierre Martin - Ingenium
A close-up image of the Dome Mine door, which gave miners an informal place to record their thoughts.
Though we can learn a lot about an artifact through research or by using our five senses to engage with it, there will always be an intangible dimension that resides in the imagination.
Photo Credit
Pierre Martin - Ingenium
Dome Mine door
This door embodies over 100 years of mining history in the Abitibi gold belt. It stood in the Dome Mine — located near Timmins, Ontario — for decades. Now part of Goldcorp Porcupine Gold Mines, the Dome Mine operated nearly continuously from 1910 to 2017, making it one of Canada’s oldest and most significant gold mines. The Dome Mine is important not only because of its longevity but because of its multi-generational impact. It is often described as “the Dome School of Mines” because many CEOs and key figures in Canadian mining worked at the Dome in some capacity.
Photo Credit
Anna Adamek | Ingenium
A refuge chamber inside the Dome Mine, where miners would safely wait for rescue in case of a problem.
The door came to Ingenium in 2018. Anna Adamek, Ingenium’s former Curator of Natural Resources and Industrial Technologies, had the opportunity to visit the Dome Mine on the last day before its closure in order to select artifacts for the national collection. While walking through the passageways with some of the miners, one person remembered the door. Covered in graffiti left by miners over the century, the door facilitated ventilation in the mine. It also gave miners the chance to record their thoughts; inscription topics vary from noting the first snow to acknowledging political assassinations.
Once in our care, Ingenium curators and conservators were determined to learn more about the door and about the inscriptions upon it. We brought the door to the Canadian Conservation Institute, where we learned that the oldest graffiti dates as far back as 1910. However, even though we were able to learn more about the door’s physical and historical properties, we remained curious about the miners who wrote upon it. Who were they? What were their lives like at the mine?
Photo Credit
Pierre Martin - Ingenium
A close-up image of the graffiti on the Dome Mine door.
Working closely with Carleton University Professor David Dean and his Public History MA students, some of the inscriptions on the door were brought to life. In the Narrativity and Performance class, each student was given an inscription and tasked with developing a backstory for the person who wrote it. Though the stories are fictional, they are grounded in research and in the door itself.
Photo Credit
David Dean
Master of Arts in Public History students from Carleton University engage with the Dome Mine door in the Ingenium Conservation Lab.
Transcript
Public History graduate students from Carleton University perform their monologues that interpret individual inscriptions on the Dome Mine door, now housed in the Ingenium Centre.
Rebecca Dolgoy
Rebecca Dolgoy is the Curator of Natural Resources and Industrial Technologies at Ingenium
More Stories by
