Wild Northerner Magazine Fall 2016 | Page 34

Leave a stone

Tourism

Back Roads Bill Steer

For Wild Northerner Magazine

There are all kinds of “things” on the back roads of northern Ontario; when you are a visitor some are more different than others.

While other things fade, stones and souls endure.

It is said that one of the first communal obligations is to provide for the dead. In the case of some Jewish settlers, the establishment of their cemetery took on certain urgency.

Northern Ontario Jews from other communities are buried here; the only such dedicated Hebrew cemetery in the northeast. There are more than 100 burial plots in the cemetery, including a war grave.

Krugerdorf was founded as a farming homestead in Chamberlain Township in the early 1900s, about 25 kilometres south of Kirkland Lake. Not officially named Krugerdorf until 1949, the area was largely settled by a number of German families. The town was given the name “The German Settlement” until it came to be called Krugerdorf.

One of the first settlers was August Kruger, a farmer and blacksmith from Germany. Having migrated to Renfrew County in 1879 (northwest of Ottawa), August and his son Frank left for northeastern Ontario, then called “New Ontario” in 1905, where he was given deed to 800 acres of land. Kruger established a farm, and a blacksmith shop, and helped provide ties and spikes to the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway, which would become the Ontario Northland Railway. Word of his success attracted other German-speaking families from Renfrew County in 1910, along with English and Scottish settlers. Later, a sawmill and threshing mill were established on the Blanche River.

The area also had a noticeable Jewish homesteading community. With the help of the Baron de Hirsch Institute of Montreal, an organization that helped Jewish immigrants to move to Canada, a small Jewish farming community was set up in the area. Free land was offered to settlers along the railroad between 1905 and 1915, attracting Jewish settlers from Russia and Romania, where they couldn’t legally own land. Among the colony were such names as Henerofsky, Gurevitch, Feldman, Levy, Goldstein, Abraham, Frumpkin, Verlieb and others. There were about fifty families in all. Eventually, the town developed, with a school, a Lutheran church, and a synagogue.