File:20150708 - 91 - Nipigon, Ont. - Front Street.jpg

English: Looking northward along Front Street in the town center of Nipigon, Ontario, Canada on a July 2015 evening. The area was frequented by French fur trappers beginning in the 17th century - and the nearby shore of Lake Superior was long the site of the Red Rock House, a Hudson's Bay Company trading post - but Nipigon as such traces its history back to 1885, when the arrival of the transcontinental railway (track bed seen at left) allowed the growth of a proper town. As with many other towns of the region, what was heretofore a small farming community with a largely Finnish-Canadian ethnic constitution gained a new economic raison d'être with the advant of the logging industry in the early 20th century, which in Nipigon's case came in the form of the Lake Sulphite Pulp Company, whose mill began operation in 1937.