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Ulysse Ovide Gervais
Eulysse Gervais

“ 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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Célestine LaBine
Celestine Labine
Mrs. Eulysse Gervais