Englehart

History

The Town of Englehart was founded when the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway (T & NO) was built through the area in the early 1900s, and named after Chairman Jacob Lewis Englehart. It was incorporated as the Town of Englehart in January 1908, as a half-way divisional point between North Bay and what became Cochrane, where the T & NO Railway met with the new National Transcontinental Railway line (now the CNR) being built west from Quebec City across the north to the Western Provinces, creating the town of Cochrane. In 1905, Jacob Lewis Englehart, from Ohio, became a key figure in the development of the railway north of North Bay in Ontario. A successful businessman from Petrolia, Ontario, nearing the current age of retirement, he was appointed in 1905, by the Premier of Ontario, to the Ontario Commission in charge of building and operating the T & NO, which would, about 1945, become the Ontario Northland Railway. He served as Chairman of a new 3-man Commission from 1906 until the fall of 1919, when he retired after the United Farmers of Ontario won their first and only four-year term in the Province of Ontario. He died at York, now Toronto, in 1921 and was buried at Petrolia. The new community of Englehart began to take shape with the construction of the line's first major bridge at the Charlton branch of Blanche River (Initially, there was a construction site for a high level trestle known as Blanche River Crossing, which opened in 1906. The Commission decided to develop a planned town on the west side of the river, from 1906-1908, as a half-way divisional point on the railway. The railway was particularly central to the settlement and development of New Ontario (now N.E. Ont.); that is, until the first gravel road,(the Ferguson Highway, now part of…