“ LAPASSE - James Labine has been stepping high all week and who can blame him. It’s not every day a man celebrates his 100th birthday but that’s just what he will be doing on Sunday. About 125 of his friends and relatives will gather in the community to celebrate along with him.

Mr. Labine was born on August 14, 1877 on the Gore Line near Westmeath. In an interview Wednesday afternoon, he said he can recall, as a boy, having to walk two miles to school. “A man by the name of Caesar Paul made my first pair of snowshoes which I used to walk to school with in the winter,” he said. Mr. Paul died a few years ago at the age of 107.

Mr. Labine said when he was seven years old he remembers being in Chalk River when a train load of volunteers from Kingston stopped at the station. “They were on the way to Manitoba to help put down the Louis Riel rebellion,” he said. When he was 29, Mr. Labine went to Northn Ontario to work on the railroad. “I was hired at New Liskeard to drive a team of horses to Turkin Lake. The company I worked for built culvery and bridges for the Timiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway.” He stayed only a short while.

“I went to Haileybury to do some prospecting,” he said. It was while he was in that community that he helped set the stage for a great moment in Candian mining history. “Ben Hollinger and Alex Gilles had been working in Toronto,” he stated, “but they came to Haileybury and John McMahon and I lent them some money and our prospecting licenses to do some prospecting.” Mr. Labine said he was to receive a share of whatever the two men found but later sold their interest. Mr. Hollinger went on to discover the famed Hollinger mines.

Mr. Labine also had a considerable amount of real estate and mortgages on houses in Haileybury but in 1927 he lost everything when a fire destroyed part of the community.

After prospecting he farmed at Uno Park near New Liskeard until 1939 when he returned to his old homestead. He operated a farm in LaPasse until 1955 when he retired, but he kept a huge garden up until three years ago. Even with the advancing years, Mr. Labine continued to amaze members of his family and the community.

During the winter months Mr. Labine used to knit to pass the time away. He made stockings for members of his family and the community. He has been knitting since he was seventeen years old. Despite his age, Mr. Labine is very alert with the only serious problem being a slight hearing impediment. He still follows the political scene though he never took any part in campaigning during his lifetime. “I have always voted liberal,” he said. “The first man I voted for was Sir Winfred Lourier. Mr. Trudeau (Prime Minister Trudeau) is as good as we can get to run the country,” he said, “but Joe Clark (Conservative Leader) doesn’t turn me on.”

Mr. Labine still rises early in the morning and rarely goes to bed before 11 p.m. after having a cup of coffee and a sandwich. He doesn’t smoke and drinks very little. “I smoked a pipe once when I was seven but I got so sick I never touched it after that,” he said. “As for drinking I drank three pints of beer once and got tipsy.” Mr. Labine said he can still recall hearing his first radio broadcast while working in New Liskeard. It was from Nashville, Tenn. and the singer was Anne Laurie. He went on to say the television is a great invention but added the greatest progress he has seen has been in agriculture. “When I first worked on a farm we had a team of horses and a single plow but the first binder came out and they were just great,” he said.

Mr. Labine is still a sports fan but not in the same degree that he used to be. He liked hockey and esepcially like to watch his nephew, Leo Labine, who starred with the Boston Bruins for several years. “He is one of the roughest there was in the game,” he said, adding that hockey today is too rough. He also like boxing and says James J. Corbert was one of the best he has ever seen. “I can recall when colored people were not allowed to hold the heavyweight championship,” he said.

Mr. Labine had six children, three boys and three girls and fourteen grandchildren who range in ages from 14 to 27. He has three sisters who are still living, and they range in ages from 94 to 77. What is he expecting in the future? “I have lived 100 years,” he said. “I don’t expect there will be another 100 for me but I will take each year as it comes.”7542,7535

“ He finally died in 1979 at the age of 102. “7486

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“ LaPasse man celebrates 100th birthday: James LaBine

Prospecting for gold in Northern Ontario and farming Westmeath Township hasn’t hurt Jim LaBine of LaPasse who is celebrating his 100th birthday this week.

His daughter Margaret Brennon says that her father was never afraid of hard work, eats everything including pork hocks and dill pickles and went for long walks until three years ago when he started to feel some of the effects of old age.

And Jim comes from a long line of brothers and sisters that too have lived well into their years. His father, John LaBine, lived until he was 81, and three of his sisters, Mrs. Euylsse Gervais, 93, Mrs. Julia LeClaire, 84, and Mrs. Molvina Brady, 77, are still living.

Jim has seen and lived a lot of the Canadian History that most of us have only read about in textbooks or watched on television. He left home when he was 27 to work on the T. & N. O. railway in Northern Ontario.

“The gang that I was on built the culverts for the bridges. There was plenty of muskeg but the company got around the problem by laying logs on top of the muskeg which was then filled with gravel.”

He remembers working with other men from the Ottawa Valley like Billie Egan of Eganville, Stephen Ryan of Killaloe, Lornie O’Brien and Joe Killroy. The gang built bridges over the MacDougall Schutts, now Matheson, the Wild Goose River and the Twin Lakes near Timmins.

He said there wasn’t much time for fun while working on the railway because there was such a big rush to get it finished and open another Canadian frontier.

In the early 1900’s working on the railway meant working everyday including Sunday for $2.60 a day minus 60 cents a day for room and board. But Jim points out that the male cook was a good one and the food was the best except for ‘hard buns’. Sleeping quarters were a tent which could be moved to follow the building of the tracks.

“We always had lots of meat. The company bought sides of beef from a butcher in Swastika and we were never hungry.”

Before Jim left home, he grew up on a farm on the Gore Line in Westmeath Township. He says that one of his most vivid memories is going to Pembroke and watching the troops leave to fight in the Nor’West Rebellion sometimes called the Riel Rebellion in Manitoba.

“Riel was a Metis teacher and I don’t think he was in the wrong. He was standing up for the rights of the Metis people who were losing their land to Ontario speculators.”

Jim says that the trains were very different in the late 1800’s. There was no breaker on the trains and the conductor was responsible for turning the wheels on the boxcar before it came into the station.

“And there was quite a hill coming into the Pembroke station.”

He said that his family was not rich but the children always had two pairs of shoes because their grandfather was a shoemaker.

“I’d wear my everyday shoes half way to church and put on the good ones before I got there.”

Jim also remembers when the Catholic Church in LaPasse was built. All the stones for the church were brought from Calumet Island by sleigh in the winter across the ice on the Ottawa River. Other stones were brought from a quarry owned by Jim McBride on Westmeath.

“I was about eight or nine at the time. Every farmer helped with the building of the church. Half the gang would gather the stones and others would stay at the building site to square the stones.”

Jim went to school on the Bromley line which was built by a storekeeper from Beachburg. The first year that the school opened there were 180 children on the register plus some older men who attended during the winter months.

“The teacher’s name was Miria Wright, a sister of the Westmeath postmistress Eva Wright.

She would put the work for the smaller children on a long blackboard which extended across the front of the classroom. I can still remember one student saying ‘Here me my lesson Miss Wright.’”

The school was heated by a barrel stove in the centre of the room with pipes extending to the roof. Miss Wright stayed at the school for a number of years before moving to Utah to live.

Jim remembers a student by the name of Bill Bromley who was a very good artist and drew sketches of the Malloy brothers who had very distinctive features.

“Jack Malloy was a short boy with a fat face and Jim Malloy was a tall, thin-faced boy. There was also another lad in the class, Dan Conley, who sketched on the plaster walls of the Derouin buildings.”

Jim says that the roads in the early 1900’s were very poor and remembers when there was no road connecting the Gore and Bromley lines. He remembers when the Malloy Line joining the two lines was finally built.

He never drove a car although he owned one and left the driving to his older sons. When he left the farm in 1904, there were very few cars except ones owned by W. H. A. Fraser and John B. Fraser.

Jim says that he always took a train or walked if it were a short distance. After he retired, he used to walk the three miles from home in LaPasse to his son’s farm on the Gore Line. He helped on the farm until 10 years ago when he still helped with the haying and only gave up gardening three years ago.

The equipment used in farming was not as sophisticated as today and threshers were operated by a steam engine. Jim still remembers when the grain was cradled by his father Joseph with his sister sheaving the grain and Jim making the bundles.

For a good part of his life, Jim was a prospector in Northern Ontario and laid the stakes for the Hollinger gold mine in Timmins, Ontario.

“There was a gold rush in Northern Ontario and I guess I got the fever after the railway was built. There were hundreds of people prospecting for silver in Cobalt and gold in Kirkland Lake but my brother-in-law and I decided to head for Timmins where there were fewer prospectors.”

In 1910 he grubstaked with Bemie Hollinger and his brother-in-law John McMahon. Grubstaking was a term used in prospecting meaining to put so much money to stake a claim and defray expenses.

“I can still remember the three of us starting to trench and after 20 feet we ran a vane of gold very close to the surface. The gold was in quartz rock.

We sold all of our shares to Noel Timmins for $300,000. We each made about $75,000. He was slow coming through with the payment and I guess we could have held out for more shares and been millionaires. We all look back on our lives and think only if we had done it differently.”

Jim never did lose his gold fever even if he never did strike it big again. In 1927 he went up to Red Lake District some 1200 miles by canoe driven by a Johnston Kitchen motor and staked that area.

When he was 38, he married Winifred Hurley of Vinton, Quebec. They lived in Haileybury before the fire and then bought a farm near Unopark in Northern Ontario.

But I can remember when he would leave the farm with one of my older brothers and leave for Red Lake to assess his claims. That was his life,” says Mrs. Brennan.

Later he moved back to the Ottawa Valley to a farm on the Gore Line until the 1950’s when one of his sons took over its operation.

However, he never lost his love for prospecting and, when he was 90, he started making arrangements to be flown back to Red Lake to stake some claims.

“I guess he knew that we wouldn’t approve and he made the arrangements secretly through the General Store,” says his niece.

“I finally told him to take one of his blankets he had bought for the trip outside and try to sleep for the night. I think this finally made him realize that his days for prospecting were over and he would have to content himself at home,” says Mrs. Brennan.

But when asked if he would like to go again, he said that he would go tomorrow if it were not for his age and the great distance he would have to travel into the bush to lay stakes.

But Jim still keeps up with the latest mining news and watches the stocks in the Ottawa newspapers. He also follows politics very closely reading all Ottawa and local newspapers carefully.

He says he has always voted Liberal although he has voted Conservative a few times in his lifetime.

“The Fraser family was Big C Conservative and our family depended on the Fraser’s to buy our grain. If we didn’t vote Conservative word got around pretty fast.”

Jim is now looking forward to his 100th birthday party at the parish hall in LaPasse Saturday. A mass will be offered in the afternoon by Father O’Connor followed by a dinner catered by the CWL.

There will be an open house Sunday at his home. It is expected that all six children and nieces and nephews will attend.

Article from the “Cobden Sun”, August 10, 1977. Author of it is unknown. “7516,7512

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A Prospector’s Legacy of Golden Memories - Obituary by Liane Heller, “Toronto Star”

He knitted mittens for the hamlet of La Passe, Ont. He supplied the local church with fresh flowers all summer long. He always had time for a chat.

When James LaBine spoke, people listened. Maybe it was compelling stories about prospecting for gold in the wilds at northern Ontario and laying down track for the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railroad.

But more than his intriguing adventures, it was James LaBine’s irrevocable link with Canada’s history that made people sit up and pay attention to him.

James LaBine would have been 102 years old in August. But it has been a hard, cold winter in his hometown near Pembroke in the rich farmland of the Ottawa Valley.

“There was a lot of flu and bad colds,” said LaBine’s daughter-in-law Rena, who lives in Pembroke. “James came down with pneumonia and was taken to the hospital on St. Valentine’s Day.”

A big man, James LaBine was rarely ill even though he lived for years in the bush working for the railroad and prospecting in the virgin territory of Ontario’s northland.

“He was a big man, I’d say maybe six-foot-three,” said Arnel Laporte, 65, who’s lived in LaPasse for 30 years, the last 20 in a house two doors away from LaBine. “He was a man, robust man, strong and healthy, able to read the daily paper right up until he took sick.”

But even LaBine’s natural resilience and strength were not enough for the ravages of pneumonia. Last Sunday he died in the Pembroke hospital.

But he left behind a precious legacy of memories for his large family and numerous friends. And Rena is determined not to lose this legacy. She’s been compiling memories, letters and anecdotes for years, turning to her husband Eric LaBine for help.

Trading Post

James was born Aug. 14, 1876 in West Meath by Pembroke. When he was still a lad, his family moved to a lumber community near Deux Rivieres, up the Ottawa River from Pembroke. His father, a portager and prospector, was manager of the Hudson Bay Co. outpost in Deux Rivieres and his mother was in charge of the keep-over, a food supply cabin.

“I remember James telling me about the Indians coming to his parents and trading moccasins for so much flower,” Rena said. “When James was 7 years old, he remembers the talk about the band of people headed for Manitoba to put down the Riel Rebellion.”

The boy was fascinated by the outdoor life, the tales of adventure. He helped his father on portages and later joined the J. R. Boothe lumber company. He was in his mid-20’s; he joined the Temiskaming and Northern Railroad, ending up in the northern mining communities of Cobalt and New Liskeard.

“He often talked about working on culverts, having to put logs over muskeg in order to do the work,” Rena said. “It was hard work, but he loved it.”

He was 29 years old, living in Cobalt-New Liskeard area where he had his first brush with prospecting. He met a young man from Toronto who had lots of enthusiasm, but little money.

The man’s name was Benny Hollinger, one of the five prospectors who discovered the Hollinger gold mine in the Timmins-Kirkland Lake District in 1907.

James and a friend grubstaked Hollinger and his partner Alex Gillies, another discoverer of the mine, in exchange for some shares in the gold they eventually found.

“With Gillies and Benny Hollinger, James worked his way from Cobalt to Timmins where James built the first cabin and cooked the first Christmas dinner ever in Timmins,” Rena said.

The Hollinger Mining Co.’s Toronto office has no record of James LaBine, but there’s a reference to him in Free Gold - The Story of Canadian Mining, a book by Arnold Hoffman on file in the River St. offices of Northern Miner Press, Ltd.

Not only does the reference link LaBine to the Hollinger discovery, it establishes a connection between the prospector and his famous cousin Gilbert LaBine, who discovered Canada’s first uranium mine in the Great Bear Lake district in 1930.

“Infected by the stories of mining told by their uncle, Jim LaBine, who had fortuitously shared in Benny Hollinger’s gold discovery, and falling into the spirit of the mining community, the brothers Gilbert and Charles were actively involved in Cobalt and Porcupine,” Hoffman writes.

Settles Down

Why didn’t James LaBine accompany his cousins on their quest for gold and uranium?

“Well, they asked him to go with them, but he had already bought real estate and was settling down,” Rena said. “He had sunk everything he had into his new life.” That life was built around his wife, Winnifred, and his growing family.

He built in the town of Haileybury near Cobalt on the shores of Temiskaming. The mining settlement soon mushroomed into a bustling community of 3500 and soon known as the “little Bay Street of the North.”

But disaster struck LaBine and his new home in 1922, when a fire destroyed Haileybury, killing many of the residents. LaBine and his family barely escaped with their lives - the security for which they had worked so hard was turned to ashes.

“After that, James farmed in New Liskeard until 1955, when he moved to LaPasse,” Rena LaBine said. “But he never gave up his love for prospecting during that time. He’d go to places like Red Lake looking for gold.”

An Acre of Garden

Even after he gave up the farm at West Meath, LaBine remained “energetic and active, keeping an acre of garden that never had a weed in it,” said Laporte, his neighbor. “Just about put me to shame with all the stuff in my garden that kept going to weed. He got up at 5 every morning to tend that garden.”

He took up knitting when he was 82 “to keep his hands flexible,” Laporte said. “Why he must have knitted socks and mitts enough to start a factory.”

He always had time for his many friends, and was devoted to his six children - all of whom are still alive - and 14 grandchildren.

“James LaBine was a soft-spoken, gentlemanly man who always gave you his full attention,” Laporte said. “I don’t think he had an enemy in the world. He commanded attention because of his nature, not at yelling.”

James LaBine would be proud of his eldest grandson, Anthony, 30, who lives in Ottawa, but plans to give up the city life for a taste of the bygone era of prospecting. “Granddad said there’s gold near Red Lake and I’d like to find it,” he said.

Article from the “The Toronto Star”, March 4, 19797543,7468

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James LaBine
James Labine
Jim LaBine

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Winifred Mary May Hurley
Winifred Hurley
Winnifred LaBine