a drop from 1,001 in 1911 to 101 just ten years later.
It was not until 1937, with the threat of war in Europe and the emergence of a profitable market for Canadian iron ore, that the Helen Mine was reopened. A sintering plant was constructed on the northern bank of the Magpie River, two miles west of the mine, to treat the siderite ore before it was shipped to the blast furnaces at Algoma Steel in Sault Ste. Marie. The plant became the centre for a small community called Centerville, composed of workers and their families.
The Helen Mine remained an open pit operation until 1950, from which point on all production came from underground mining. In 1960, the new George W. MacLeod Mine went into production adjacent to the Helen Mine. The ore was transported on an aerial tramline that consisted of over 280 steel three-ton buckets travelling underground and then surfacing three-quarters of a mile west of the 2,066-foot vertical MacLeod Shaft. The tramline then continued the remaining two miles to the Sinter Plant on overhead cables. This system was replaced in 1979 by the latest in underground mining technology, the highest-lift single-drive conveyor in the world.
During the summer of 1971, Wawa hosted an archaeological field camp known as the Wawa Drop-In Project or the Big Dig, for young hitchhikers travelling along Highway 17. The project was directed by the late Professor K.C.A. Dawson. and supported by the federal government as part of its youth employment program. The results of fieldwork at several important sites were never published, though all the records are currently held by the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa.
Throughout the 1990s, Wawa and the Algoma Ore Division continued to be challenged by international market problems that plagued both the gold and iron mining industries. In December 1997, Algoma Steel announced that it could no longer support the high cost of extracting low-grade iron at Algoma Ore Division
