TRANSCRIPT

Interview of Eddie Duke by Marlene Gamble July, 2003

Many of the people who came to Kirkland Lake, that were passing through, came from the original Krugerdorf settlement which was just south of Englehart, between Kirkland Lake and Englehart. This settlement took place in the early nineteen hundreds, around 1905 - 1910 when the government offered free land to settlers who would come to northern Ontario. And the ONR Railway was being built. Many of the Jewish people who came north at that time were people who had come from Russia and Poland in what was known as the Russian Pale of Settlement, I think, and in that particular area Jews were not allowed to own land, although there were many successful Jewish tailors and tradesmen and even some, probably some, wealthy people, they were just not allowed to own farmland and of course most of them were very poor. What they wanted more than anything else was to own a piece of land of their own where they could keep their cattle and their livestock and farm and live like the rest of the world. It was very close, very dear to their hearts.

So the people who came north in the early days of that time stopped in the Krugerdorf area where they were given farms.