Iroquois Falls

Northern Ontario company town on the Abitibi River, planned around a once-dominant paper mill.

Iroquois Falls is a small town of about 4,500 in northeastern Ontario, on the Abitibi River about 90 km east of Timmins. It was built as a company town in the early 20th century around a pulp and paper mill — the Abitibi Power and Paper Company founded it in 1913, and the mill operated for most of the century. Like many single-industry towns in northern Ontario, it has struggled since the mill's decline.

The town has an unusual distinction: it is one of the best-preserved examples of early 20th century company town planning in Ontario, with a grid of streets laid out with workers' housing, a community centre, and civic buildings. The Iroquois Falls Museum documents this history. For travellers in northern Ontario, the town is a practical stop on the route through the region, and the Abitibi River offers fishing and paddling. The Rene Brunelle Provincial Park nearby has camping and good boreal forest walking.

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Things to Do

Iroquois Falls is not a destination in the conventional sense — it is a place you visit to understand how northern Ontario was built, and because the landscape around it is genuinely wild and accessible. The Abitibi River, which runs through town, offers good paddling and fishing for walleye and pike. Rene Brunelle Provincial Park, 15 kilometres south, has a campground, a beach on Lake Commando, and boreal forest trails that see almost no one on a weekday.

The town itself rewards a slow walk through the residential grid. The company town layout — identical workers' cottages on measured lots, a community hall, a school, a recreational centre all placed with deliberate care by Abitibi Power and Paper — is unusually intact for early-20th-century industrial planning. The Iroquois Falls Museum, in the town's former fire hall, documents both the mill's history and the lives of the people who ran it.