You can bank on us having a Cochrane history feature every Monday. For the next couple weeks, we’ll discuss the early banks in town and their brushes with fire.
We start with the Imperial Bank, now CIBC.was built quickly, when appearances were not a high priority.
“Functionalism was the order of the day,” library archivist Ardis Proulx-Chedore states.”The front yard of the Imperial Bank of Canada office with littered with slash, stumps and rock, the leftovers from a fast tree clearing operation.”
…That’s an excerpt from the Northland Post.
“The Imperial Bank opened the Cochrane branch in March of 1909 at the present site as a one-storey structure. In the spring of 1910, the second storey was added.”
Some people would call it a miracle that the bank building escaped the great fires of 1911 and 1916, while most of the buildings surrounding it were destroyed.
Our thanks to the library for access to its archives.
