Elinor Barr

Date of Birth: 2 April 1933
Date of Death: 16 February 2025
Accomplishments: Notable and accomplished historian of northwestern Ontario history

Elinor Barr was an accomplished and prolific historian of northwestern Ontario's history, leaving a considerable legacy of work that documents and interprets the region's heritage.

Born Elinor Berglund in 1933, she grew up in Ignace, Ontario, which would later become one of her notable historical focuses. She graduated from McKellar Hospital as a registered nurse in 1954 and was also married to Peter Barr that same year. She would go on to spend most of the rest of her life in Port Arthur/Thunder Bay.

However, after graduating with an Honours Degree in History from Lakehead University in 1974, her primary attention would turn to this field. Since then, she had a long and distinguished career as a historical writer, researcher, book publisher (Singing Shield Productions), and distributor.

Some of Elinor’s notable historical works include Thunder Bay to Gunflint: The Port Arthur, Duluth & Western Railway, published by The Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society; Silver Islet: Striking it Rich in Lake Superior; The Frontier as Experienced on the Pre-cambrian Shield: A Study of Ignace, Ontario from 1883-1908, and several others. In 2015, she published an important work, Swedes in Canada: Invisible Immigrants, which traced the history of Swedish immigration to Canada. Elinor also co-produced the TV series Distant Voices and wrote the script for the film The Castle of White Otter Lake.

Through this work, Elinor left a considerable and valuable record of archival material collected and generated, which will form an important component of the Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society’s archival collection. This collection includes everything from research notes for works on Silver Islet and the Port Arthur, Duluth and Western Railway, to primary source documents relating to Scandinavian immigration to and life in Thunder Bay. Elinor also contributed numerous articles to the Thunder Bay Historical Museum Society, both in its weekly ‘Looking Back’ column and in several issues of the Papers & Records yearly periodical. She was a long-time supporter of the Museum.