Nairn and Hyman is a township in the Canadian province of Ontario. The township, located in the Sudbury District, borders on the southwestern city limits of Greater Sudbury west of the city's Walden district. The township had a population of 373 in the 2021 Canadian census.
The township contains the communities of Nairn Centre () and Prospect Hill ().
History
Indigenous people have inhabited the Lake Huron north shore and Manitoulin area for millennia,The Sheguiandah archaeological site, on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, is one of Canada's oldest. It has Archaic, Paleo-Indian, and pre-Clovis components.> and historically used the nearby Spanish (Skiminitigan in Ojibwe) and Vermilion rivers as transportation and economic corridors which connected Lake Huron's North Channel with the interior to the north (through the Spanish) and through the river system around Lake Wanapitei, ultimately to the Ottawa River (through the Vermilion).
The non-indigenous communities in the township were a result of the Canadian Pacific Railway's development of its Algoma extension from Sudbury to Sault Ste. Marie in the 1880s. The first two buildings in the town were its CPR station and section house, which housed CPR employees. During this time, the railway station was known as Nelson, and the nearby town known as Nelsonville to local people. The unofficial community around the station grew rapidly, and by the 1890s had got its first general store at the intersection of Hall and Front streets, which was built out of logs. After a few years, however, early attempts were made to create an official township under the name Nairn, which was chosen after a railway engineer's hometown of Nairn, Scotland.
In 1896, the township was officially chartered as a municipality formed from the geographic townships of Nairn, Lorne, and Hyman, and a reeve and municipal councillors were elected. In lieu of a town hall, the municipal council initially met at the town's Foresters hall until 1905, then a local hotel (which was owned by the first town clerk) until 1909, and afterward at the town jail; the Foresters hall was destroyed by a fire around 1916. Today, the town hall and community centre building is located on MacIntyre Street, on the site of the former town jail.
Within the next decade, Nairn's three churches were constructed: All Saints Anglican Church in 1897, St Jude Roman Catholic Church around 1900, and the local Methodist, later United church, in 1904. St Jude, located on MacIntyre Street, was demolished in the early 1970s and its site is presently used for the town's fire hall. The United church stands at the intersection of Smith Street and Highway 17, but has been abandoned for decades. The town's historical religious relations have been described as generally harmonious, though an Orange Hall was constructed in 1925 by Levi Pomfrey, an early English settler from Cambridgeshire who had been the town reeve in 1903. The Orange Order (or 'Orangemen') would conduct annual marches on July 12, the anniversary of the Battle of Aughrim, where in 1691 the Protestant forces of William of Orange defeated the Catholic Jacobite forces of James Stuart in their struggle for control of Britain and Ireland. Orange marches would typically end at the Roman Catholic church.
In 1907, the town fathers began to petition the Ontario provincial government to fund a road bridge across the Spanish River, as a great deal of lumbering activity was taking place on the other side. This was denied, but in 1908 a bridge was funded and constructed by the Graves Bigwood Company, which also built a set of stables and a barracks and cookhouse across the river for teamsters who were involved in hauling lumber. Graves Bigwood made the decision to relocate their office there from Wahnapitae, and the area became known as the "Headquarters". At the time, McKerrow had not yet come to exist, and the nearest settlement to the west was Espanola. This bridge became a component of the "Soo Road", which ultimately stretched from Sudbury to Sault Ste. Marie as an unreliable patchwork of local roads; this would be improved again around 1923 by the Department of Northern Development. Around 1931, the original bridge across the Spanish was washed away in a flood, and was replaced by a rudimentary ferry service that connected what is now Ferry Street with Headquarters Hill Road. Despite renewed petitions for a new bridge to replace the ferry, the service continued to operate until the late 1960s before discontinuing and effectively severing the connection between Nairn proper and the Headquarters area, which today is connected to Nairn via Highway 17 and Sand Bay Road over a causeway.
During the First World War, 35 local men and boys enlisted, which was around 12% of the town's population at the time. Only one was killed: Cpl Roy Harmon, who died in 1918 and is buried at the cemetery in Nœux-les-Mines. 18 or 19 enlisted in the Second World War, with two killed: L/Cpl Lloyd Martin (Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Canada), who was killed in the Netherlands in 1945 and is buried in the Groesbeek Canadian War Cemetery, and Flying Officer James Smith (Royal Canadian Air Force), who was killed in 1944 and is buried in the Harrogate (Stonefall) Commonwealth War Graves Commission Cemetery, Harrogate, Yorkshire, England.
With its strong base as a railway town, Nairn developed a significant logging industry which employed many people, and the population grew quickly. Multiple logging companies had operations in the town, with warehouses next to the town's CPR siding, where companies would distribute supplies to logging camps throughout the area; the logs themselves were moved using the Spanish and Vermilion rivers. The town's growth, however, began to slow during the 1920s, as by 1923 most of the pine in the area had been logged out. Logging operations shifted elsewhere, putting up to 1000 men out of work, and causing the town's population to steeply decline.
During the Great Depression, a relief office was opened, and many residents survived on government relief payments. Several public works projects were undertaken to create temporary employment, such as replacement of the town's original wooden sidewalks with cement, as well as road improvements. This road work improved access to the town, and was eventually followed by the construction of the current Highway 17 around 1947.
The town's fortunes changed by the late 1940s, as lumber industrialist Benjamin F. Merwin under his Pineland Timber Company moved into the area, building a modern sawmill and landing lucrative contracts for mining timbers with companies such as Inco. The mill was quickly upgraded and expanded throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, and Merwin appointed his son, Bud, as superintendent of Nairn operations. In 1962, the Pineland company was sold to KVP and Inco.
Another raft of changes occurred in the 1960s under KVP management. Previously, the mill had been operated seasonally in the summer, but transitioned to year-round operations. The mill's waste operations, which involved simply burning mill waste at a dump site near the town, caused significant air pollution and environmental degradation to the area, and to alleviate these issues, a modern burner was installed north of the mill. In 1962, the mill's workforce was unionized under Lumber and Sawmill Worker's Union (LSWU) Local 2537, and standardized pay grades were established. All of these changes created a stronger sense of permanence for the mill, and economic stability for the town.
Things would continue to change at the mill throughout the next few decades. In 1969, KVP was purchased by Brown Forest Industry, which sold off its Espanola and area operations to the E.B. Eddy Company, and E.B. Eddy once again modernized and upgraded the mill, increasing the output from in 1980 to in 1984. By 1995, the mill had a workforce of 317 and produced of lumber. Today the mill still operates and is owned by EACOM Timber Corporation.
Over these decades from the 1940s to the 1990s, the town itself changed significantly as well: road travel had begun to replace railway travel as the Canadian Pacific Railway phased out passenger transportation, and the centre of activity in the community shifted south, with the original area of settlement suffering a long-term decline. From two stopping trains in each direction in 1943 (with one western route turning south at McKerrow to serve Espanola and Manitoulin and the other continuing further west to Sault Ste. Marie), passenger service was reduced to a single train per direction per day by 1970, and Greyhound bus service grew in popularity during the 1950s. Early town plans in 1897 had called for a Hammond Road to run along the path of the CPR tote road and cross the Spanish at a similar location to the CPR's rail bridge. This was finally realized with the construction of the new Ontario Highway 17 around 1947, the culmination of about a decade of road construction and public works projects in the area. The new highway was routed south of the town's main commercial area, and facilitated a slow drift of the centre of the town away from the original core formed around the CPR station and Hall's general store. Some businesses relocated to new highway-adjacent locations, while others closed one by one, and there was a gradual shift away from hotels, taverns, and small retail, toward garages and gas stations, as truck freight became more frequent along the new highway, and larger centres like Espanola and Sudbury became more accessible for residents. The possibilities of car commuting depressed demand for temporary accommodation and therefore decreased the customer base for the town's hotels and boarding houses, as workers could now commute from larger urban centres, and seasonal industries, which heavily utilized temporary accommodations, declined. However, a new residential subdivision was built south of the highway in the 1960s as the town experienced a population boom due to an increase in the workforce at the lumber mill. Passenger rail service ended altogether in 1976, and the Nairn railway station was demolished sometime after.
On January 1, 1998, the Township of Nairn was merged with the unincorporated geographic Township of Hyman to form the new Township of Nairn and Hyman.
The focus of development in the town in recent decades has increasingly been on improving infrastructure and local services in the hopes of attracting new residents, and functioning largely as a residential community with significant industrial activity throughout the township relative to its population, with some remaining commercial activity remaining in the form of the truck stop.
On November 22, 2021, Laurier Falldien resigned as the town's mayor, citing opposition to COVID-19 vaccine mandates.Colleen Romaniuk, "Sudbury-area mayor, opposed to mandatory COVID-19 vaccination, quits post". Toronto Star, November 24, 2021.
Demographics In the 2021 Census of Population conducted by Statistics Canada, Nairn and Hyman had a population of living in of its total private dwellings, a change of from its 2016 population of . With a land area of , it had a population density of in 2021.
Economy
Since shortly after its settlement, Nairn's primary economic activity has been logging and lumber milling, and the lumber mill there is today owned and operated by EACOM Timber Corporation. There was some minor agricultural activity in the township in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but this has since declined. The Nairn Falls Dam and Generating Plant, built in 1915, was once a source of employment for some people in the town, but has since become almost entirely automated.
The town is home to two local businesses involved in construction and transportation, OCL Trucking and Excavating and T. Bell Transport, which both operate gravel pits in the area.