Victoria Mines, also called Victoria Mine, was a mining settlement and company town of the Mond Nickel Company in Greater Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. Victoria Mine was located to the west of Whitefish on Fairbank Lake Road in the former municipality of Walden.
The settlement, along with the community of Mond, were established in 1899 for employees of Victoria Mine and the nearby smelter. With the closure of the smelter in 1913 and the mine in 1923, both towns were abandoned and the last house was removed from Mond in 1936.
History
left|thumb|Roast Bed at Victoria Mine
Victoria Mines and Mond were established by German-born British chemist and industrialist Ludwig Mond as company towns for the Mond Nickel Company in 1899. The mine itself was originally prospected in 1886 by Henry Ranger. Mond, having created the Mond process for extracting and purifying nickel in 1890, purchased the mine site in 1899 to ship the ores to a refinery in Clydach, Wales. Operations at the mine began in February of 1901, with production reaching 5,000 tons per month by 1915. The diversity of the community, including its linguistic diversity, was reflected in the organization of miners. For example, a Finnish shift supervisor, Matti Manninen, mainly supervised Finns on his shift. The community was laid out to the north of the Canadian Pacific line, with a station built in 1904. Victoria Mine had an assortment of businesses and services, including a butcher shop, barbershop, dry goods and grocery retailers, a bowling alley, a Roman Catholic church, a Presbyterian church, and public and separate schools.