Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada
Thunder Bay
Thunder Bay is a mid-sized Canadian city located on the western shore of Lake Superior, one of the world’s largest freshwater lakes. The city has its origins in a French fur trading post opened in 1679 and has seen more or less continuous settlement since that date. In the mid-19th-century, as its fur trade days were waning, the community became a centre for mining activity, primarily silver, and later became a railway hub. It was the location for the turning of the sod for the first transcontinental railway across Canada and became a major grain shipping port. The city, then composed of two communities (Fort William and Port Arthur), grew rapidly due to large-scale immigration and a booming economy before the First World War. It soon became a location for heavy industries including iron and steel and, more recently, pulp and paper. Later in the later 20th century, Thunder Bay (the name adopted after Fort William and Port Arthur amalgamated in 1970) grew to become a service centre for regional government, education and commerce, a role it performs to this day. Thunder Bay remains a culturally diverse community, made up of people who can trace their ancestry to all parts of the world but who live united as Canadians.