Sudbury: Rail Town to Regional Capital

Eileen Goltz is an associate librarian and chair of the Public Services
Department at Laurentian University.

Sudbury, which began in 1883 as a muddy railway-construction camp
boasting only a few hundred inhabitants, had by the 1990s become a
complex, metropolitan city of nearly 93,000 centred in a political
region of 158,000 people. This book’s 11 chapters, each covering a
decade, chronicle the city’s development. Nine academics, all
associated with Sudbury’s Laurentian University, contributed the 11
chapters, some of which are more fluid and more interesting that others.


The authors explain how Sudbury became dependent on
resource-development industries, and how it eventually reduced that
dependence. They show how Sudbury grew to dominate—socially,
economically, and politically—the region in which it was located.

The index is helpfully detailed. The endnotes and bibliography suggest
that the authors relied heavily on local newspapers, students’ theses,
and government publications. Given the dearth of material on the history
of Sudbury, this book answers a need at both the academic and the
popular level.