News
The silos are a Flour Mill landmark.
Flour Mill appeals to first-time home buyers
BY MAX LEIGHTON
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Mark Fraser is a local actor who moved to Sudbury three years ago from Edmonton. He bought a home on Murray St. That's in the Flour Mill, a neighbourhood between Ste. Anne and Lasalle along Notre Dame that has become popular with young first-time home buyers.
For many residents of Sudbury, the historic Flour Mill (In French, the community is known as Moulin à Fleur) has developed a reputation over the years as an area of urban neglect, but this perception is beginning to change with people such as Fraser leading the way.
"It's a tight knit, self-sustaining community. It has its own local pharmacy, grocery store, schools and bars. Everything you need right here, and it's close to downtown," says Fraser.
He could have chosen to move to the suburbs, but he has a certain pride in living in a neighbourhood as old as this one.
"We own one of the city’s original farmhouses. There is a lot of history here," he says.
The Flour Mill is one of the oldest neighbourhoods in the city. It gets its name from the Ontario and Manitoba Flour Mill, which was constructed in 1910 to process grain harvested in the French-Canadian farmlands in the Valley. (In 1915, the Sudbury mills received an order from the Hague for 117,000 sacks of flour to feed the hungry during the First World War.)
It was a welcoming neighbourhood for French-Canadians who moved into the area seeking work logging, then to work in farming and agricultural supply, and finally hard rock mining.
People who grew up in the area still have an affection for the Flour Mill. The neighbourhood was built with great pride, from the painstaking efforts taken to construct St. Jean de Brebeuf Church during the Depression to the 1990 struggle to preserve the original mill silos from demolition.
Unfortunately, this proud local history is not what many residents of Sudbury associate with the Flour Mill. Like much of the mighty West End, the Flour Mill suffered from successive strikes at Inco and major economic recessions from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Rents dropped off, the neighbourhood began to decline, and many of the old Franco-Ontarian families moved out.
But the neighbourhood is changing. Lowered rents and close proximity to the downtown core make the Flour Mill an excellent place for students and new homeowners.
Today's Flour Mill is a neighbourhood where young professionals and local artists live side by side with new Canadian families and with French-Canadians whose roots spanning the generations. This eclectic mix appeals to Fraser.
"As a young person I can't see anywhere else I would rather be. I like being close to the culture, the music scene and the arts of the downtown area, and the fact that it is affordable, accessible and community oriented attracts the kind of people that make this city cool."
As for the reputation, he tells me, “ it may give the area a little edge but really it’s a thing of the past.”
