Happy Valley, Greater Sudbury, Ontario
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- For other places with this name, see Happy Valley or Happy Valley, Ontario.
Happy Valley is a ghost town in the Ontario city of Greater Sudbury, Canada.
The community of Happy Valley, originally known as Spruce Valley, was first inhabited in 1906 by workers from the nearby mine at Garson. Not wanting to live in a state of dependency in the company town, they built this smaller town of humble shacks with narrow streets. In 1930, the Garson Mine shut down, and the workers were transferred to the mines at Falconbridge.
However, due to temperature inversions, the smelter at Falconbridge created severe pollution problems in Happy Valley, as heavy sulphur emissions from the smelter would become trapped in the valley. For years, workers suspected that they were being poisoned by pollution, and these fears were confirmed in the 60s and 70s as society grew more environment-conscious. For several years, the community reached a deal with Falconbridge that the smelter would not operate on days when a north wind was blowing. Eventually the company simply bought out the town, which was entirely abandoned in the late 1960s. Today the valley remains desert-like and dead because of pollution.
From 1973 to 2000, the Happy Valley site was part of the town of Nickel Centre, in the Regional Municipality of Sudbury. On January 1, 2001, the Regional Municipality was dissolved into the single-tier City of Greater Sudbury.
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