By: Yvonne Fox
Why are museums an important asset to communities you ask?
Thank goodness we had the foresight years ago to have columns from the Victoria Inverness Bulletin typed and put in binders. They’re a valuable resource as I’m trying to have facts and content to go with pictures recognizing the construction of the Canso Causeway, along with local tidbits.
Workers are pictured in the summer of 1952 working on Porcupine Mountain.
By June, 1952, work began in Auld’s Cove clearing the site of the Canso Causeway project. Workmen began clearing a campsite at the settlement for use by two Vancouver Construction firms doing preliminary rock fill work on the Canso Causeway.
F.D. Cajse of Vancouver, job superintendant, put 148 men from this area to work. The job was estimated to take three weeks. Mr. Cajse said that there would be no activity on the Cape Breton side that summer.
What might have been a fatality happened in Port Hastings on June 25 when six-year-old Brian Langley, son of Mr. And Mrs. Ellis Langley, who was playing at the old Pier, picked up a rock and threw it in the water, falling backwards overboard. Linden MacIntyre, the nine-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. D.R. MacIntrye, went in after him and held him up until Vicky McLellan came to the rescue and helped get him to safety.
This is the fourth in a series of columns from the Port Hastings Historical Society celebrating the 65th anniversary of the opening of the Canso Causeway, and marking the closure of the Mulgrave to Point Tupper ferry.