Oliver Hall joined Noranda Inc. almost at its inception, responsible for both mine operations and exploration. His foresight and economic sense promoted the company’s rapid growth in the 1930s and 1940s to become one of the country’s greatest mining concerns.
James Roycroft Gordon enjoyed a long and illustrious career with Inco Ltd., rising through the ranks to become the company’s first Canadian-born president.
Horace John Fraser’s career was a varied one: a gifted student, a respected teacher, a wartime civil servant in the United States, and a senior mining executive in the private sector. He is best remembered, however, for his private sector career, during which he oversaw the merger of Ventures Limited. and Falconbridge Nickel Mines into Falconbridge Ltd.
Sometimes referred to as “the King of the Minemakers” at the height of his career, James Boylen was best known for the discovery and development of the volcanogenic massive sulphide deposits in the Bathurst area of New Brunswick in the early 1950s.
The list of mines in which Mervyn Arthur Upham played a significant role developing is considerable - 22 in Canada alone, several more internationally.
Richard Valentine Porritt was the man who set the pace and style that marked a “Noranda man” - tough and fast-moving.
James McCrea was instrumental in building Dome Mines into one of the giants of the Canadian mining industry. He was responsible for acquiring and developing Dome’s Sigma mine in northwestern Quebec in the early 1930s, which has been producing gold for 56 years, and the Campbell Red Lake gold mine, one of Canada’s premier gold producers and also still in production.
Joseph Errington embodied the spirit of mining prior to the Second World War as the country pulled itself out of the depths of the Depression in the 1930s and mining became a prime force in creating a prosperous and bustling postwar Canada.
The Kerr Addison mine near Virginiatown, Ontario ranks among the top gold mines in Canada, producing at its peak more than half a million ounces of gold every year. No one deserves more credit for turning the mine into the enormously successful venture it became than William S. Row.
John Kostuik exemplified the rough and ready ways of the hard-rock miner. A mining engineer, he cut his teeth by somehow managing to eke out of profits for what was in the late 1930s the lowest-grade mine in Canada. Howey Gold Mines, in fact, proved to be a training ground for low-cost mining methods.
