The Claybelt and its Riches:

       New Liskeard is located in a large open bay on the northwestern part of Lake Temiskaming. The Wabi River empties into the lake, which drains hundreds of acres of flat clay farmland. Several local Indian families camped periodically along the riverbank, as this whole basin was their traditional hunting and trapping grounds. Indian families had been inhabiting the southern end of Lake Temiskaming since the early 1600s. By the late 1600s and early 1700s, the Hudson Bay Company built Fort Temiskaming on the east side of the lake, just north of where the lake narrows to about 200 yards in width.  Here the water flows swiftly but was navigable.

            Gradually the native inhabitants and then the Europeans, some of whom were associated with the Hudson Bay Company, crept further north and eventually established settlements on both sides of the lake. Ville Marie was a gathering point.  Soon Haileybury was established and then New Liskeard in about 1890. Before 1900 the government of Ontario had sent in surveying teams and most of the area had been surveyed into townships of six square miles. By 1910 the railroad was to New Liskeard, having served Cobalt and Haileybury a year or two earlier.

                New Liskeard was part of the Township of Dymond, until it was separated and incorporated in 1903. Local land agents were selling farms quickly and the available land was getting further from the towns and along the rivers. After the discovery of silver and gold in the area and the building of the railroad, the whole area began to open up with roads and rail lines reaching out in all directions.  Soon the railroad pushed on to the Kirkland Lake gold fields and then on to the Timmins area.