Rare is the highway traveller who passes the city of Sudbury in northern Ontario and fails tonotice that nickel has significance for this community.
?Rare is the highway traveller who passes the city of Sudbury in northern Ontario and fails to
register that nickel has some significance to the community.
The significance is partly obvious when travellers notice the characteristic hard rock mine structures and, of course, the massive Inco smelter. Sudbury is headquarters to Inco, supplier of 24% of the world's nickel demand, much of it carved out of the rock of the Sudbury basin.
Suddenly, however, far more arresting than signs of obvious industry, just on the city's western outskirt, perched high on a bare rock is the largest five cent piece ever made, the Big Nickel. Definitely, nickel has a place in this community.
Brainchild of a local businessman, Ted Szilva, the Big Nickel measures 30 feet in diameter and is 24 inches thick.
Originally Szilva simply entered his idea for the Nickel and an adjacent amusement park in a local contest to choose the city's project to commemorate Canada's Centennial. He didn't win the contest. Now, no one seems to remember just who did win it or what the winning idea was. Whatever it may have been, it has been left in the shadow cast by the Big Nickel.
"You lose" was not a judgment Szilva was prepared to accept. Instead, he decided to go ahead with the project on his own. First of course would be the Big Nickel monument itself, the centerpiece of his plan. Surrounding it would be a model operational mine, a museum, and a numismatic/souvenir shop. Later he added more giant coin replicas: two one cent pieces, one Canadian and the other American; a twenty dollar gold piece; and a Kennedy half dollar. He also added a model railroad offering rides for children, a replica space shuttle, and a few totem poles.
To get his project underway, Szilva purchased a few acres of rock overlooking Inco's main smelter, a view he doubtless thought provided just the right ambience for his theme park.
The Big Nickel and the other replica coins were constructed by Szilva's business partner, Bruno Carvallo, a local artist and sign maker. He used an inner core of wood covered with thin sheets of stainless steel, appropriate considering nickel is a key component in stainless steel. When all of the bills were tallied, the Big Nickel's price tag was $35,000, probably making it the most valuable five cent piece in history.
In 1964, luminaries gathered in Sudbury from across Canada to officially open the Big Nickel Centennial Numismatic Amusement Park. Nickel was now on the map. It remained for the city of Sudbury to now catch up with Szilva.
Indeed, the city bustled through the last of the sixties and the seventies. Tourism seized the region: fishing, hunting, and winter recreation leading the way. The region could boast 160 freshwater lakes with plentiful stocks of trout, walleye, whitefish, and pike. Along with the lakes, five provincial parks were available for camping and hiking.
Later, organizers began what has become the longest running summer concert festival in Canada - more than 100 concerts each year beginning in July. Other attractions include the National Powerboat Championships and Canada's fourth largest film festival. Next to mining, tourism became the area's most important industry.
The Big Nickel thrived throughout this period. Szilva contracted miners to construct an authentic head frame and sink a vertical shaft to 165 feet of underground drifts. The self-guided underground tour was becoming as much an attraction as the Big Nickel itself.
At the height of tourist season, a retired miner was usually on duty below to explain the old equipment, mining methods, and local geology. If he was feeling particularly talkative, tourists might also hear tales of disasters and narrow escapes, or perhaps some of the tales of prospectors who were more lucky than knowledgeable. In that regard, even Sudbury's nickel and copper bonanza was discovered by accident by workers constructing the national railway in 1882 and nearly twenty years passed before it was exploited.
1981 was the last year of operation of the Big Nickel as an amusement park. That year Szilva sold the site to Cambrian College, a school already renowned for its mining courses. In years previous Cambrian students had lengthened the underground drifts to more than a thousand feet. The college felt the site was ideal for training.
All non-mining related items - the train, the totem poles, the space shuttle; were removed with the exception of the Big Nickel. That had become almost as much an icon to Sudbury citizens as the HOLLYWOOD sign on the hill over Hollywood is to Los Angelinos.
When mineral prices plummeted, unemployed miners were hired to further expand the underground works. Tourists, now on fully guided tours, were able to see an operating mine, perhaps not realizing they were themselves the mother lode.
The original head frame is now gone; so, too, the rattling rickety elevator. Entrance to the mine is now through a modern building, the elevator to the workings as modern as that in a new office building. The Big Nickel was disassembled a few years ago for rebuilding - its wood core required replacement.
With all, the Big Nickel site is better than ever, continuing to be a must-see attraction for visitors to Sudbury, and continuing to be developed. Now called Dynamic Earth, the site will eventually include a theatre, exhibit galleries, and a multi-media program designed to enhance the experience of the underground tour, a remarkable year round attraction.
Doubtless, too, the site will be landscaped with plenty of the red pine and jack pine seedlings grown by Inco in played out mine shafts nearly a mile underground. To date Inco has reforested thousands of acres of impacted (by mining) land and grown more than a million seedlings in these
shafts.
Over nearly forty years the $35,000 Big Nickel has well demonstrated that great things can still be bought with five cents.
