The Miner marked 40th year with move to new quarters

Editor’s note: The Northern Miner recently moved from its premises in Toronto to new office space in Don Mills, Ont. The following is a speech delivered in 1955 by then President Norman C. Pearce at a staff function on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the weekly newspaper. We were once referred to, by jealous rivals in the mining publication field, as the Old Lady of Richmond Street. But acMD253tually, friends, we have only arrived at the stage of well-rounded maturity — the age at which a woman is considered by many to represent the height of appeal and attractiveness. I’ll just say that The Northern Miner is fair, fat and forty — and very happy about it.

The paper, as the oldtimers know, was published at Cobalt, Ont. for 14 years, mostly in rented quarters. I remember the first of these: the place was so small and crowded that the only way the operators could get at the old Campbell press on which we printed was down through a trapdoor in the ceiling. A little later we got larger basement space in the Bilsky Block. This was turned into the local liquor store when we moved into still larger quarters.

In 1929 we bought our present building on Richmond St. and moved business had grown beyond Cobalt’s facilities and location and we had to have a central point if we were to gratify our ambition to make The Northern Miner a national rather than a northern paper.

We are now engaged in another move along the road of progress; we have bought the building two doors east — this time next to a liquor store — and this week we started remodeling it.

This summer our editorial, and various business offices, will be ensconced in the new quarters, leaving the mechanical staffs more leg and arm room at 122.

I look backward as we reach this milestone, this completion of the 40th year of publication, and I see, as do my older colleagues, a pleasant road but a hard and deep and narrow one. produce every week, without failure, a paper always newsy and valuable and timely has called for dogged endurance through times of struggle, and unflagging effort on the part of all.

We have not faltered and we shall not fail to give each week our inner strength and our creative power. Some of the years, looking back, have been hard — nearly half have been spent in times of war or depression.

I cannot recall what the circulation was in 1916 but I can tell you that one of my first jobs, when I joined the staff after the First World War, in 1920, was to screen all the deadwood out of the subscription and dealer list and we started afresh, from that point, with 300 readers. In that year our total business, all kinds, would not equal one week’s payroll this year.

But within a couple of years after the First World War our field quickly broadened out with discoveries in Quebec and elsewhere and by 1926 we had 6,000 subscribers, by 1927 it was 11,000 and we steadily forged ahead of all competition until we reached the position of the largest mining circulation in the entire world.