523 Brodie Street North

523 Brodie Street North
House
Address	523 Brodie Street North, Fort William
Coordinates	48.39288804446013, -89.24706146569571
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523 Brodie Street North is a small house on Brodie Street North in the former city of Fort William, now part of Thunder Bay, Ontario. It is the house shown in a then-and-now photo pair that Richard Archibald posted to a Facebook group on 2 November 2026, captioned as the first home of Lulu Jackson on Brodie Street with Drew School visible in the background.

Location

The house is at 523 Brodie Street North; its coordinates are 48.392888, -89.247061 (map). Henderson's directories of 1920 and 1950 list the address as "523 Brodie Street North, Fort William", so before the two cities merged into Thunder Bay the house was in Fort William and not in Port Arthur. Drew School stood a short way to the south-west, at the corner of Syndicate Avenue and Finlayson Street, and The Summit Church is now at 515 Syndicate Avenue North, close to that corner.

Timeline

• 1920: Henderson's directory lists Francis Cornes, a labourer, at 523 Brodie Street North.
• 1950: Henderson's directory lists John A. McAteer, a Canadian Pacific Railway conductor, and his wife Florence at the address. The directories give an address and not a building, so they show who was listed at 523 Brodie Street North in those years, not that the house in the photograph was the building then.
• Date unknown: The post's caption calls the house the first home of Lulu Jackson, and the thread does not say when she lived there. A page exists for a Lulu Jackson who was a stenographer in Fort William in 1907, but nothing links her to this house, so the two are not asserted to be the same person. In the thread, Michael McFarlane also commented simply "Lulu Jackson?".
• Until about the mid-1960s: A family named Graham lived in the house, according to Gerry Zeleny, who called it his old neighbourhood.
• About 1972 to about 1986: Michael McFarlane owned the house. He put a basement under it and built an addition at the back; by his account he was just a kid who had married young and was full of energy, did a lot of work on the place, and probably lost money when he sold it. His family was known in the neighbourhood as "the animal rescue family". Marilyn Orser Martens remembered spending a lot of time at the house in those years and loving the family's pets, including a skunk and a raccoon.
• Across the street: The house at 526 Brodie Street North was the home of Adrian Marson, who wrote that he lived there; he did not say in which years. Henderson's 1920 directory lists Grant Babion of Canadian Car and Foundry at the same address.

Drew School and the neighbourhood

The archival photograph shows Drew School in the background. Two commenters said they attended the school:

• Kenny Kantola grew up in the neighbourhood and went to Drew School in the early 1950s.
• Lori Cook attended Drew School until grade 7 in the late 1960s and early 1970s and then went on to McKellar Park School.

Diana Pallen and Evert Ohraniemi also commented, calling the post a walk down memory lane and saying the original house is perfect.

The photographs

The archival photograph is undated. It shows a single-storey frame house with a hipped roof and a covered front porch standing on a bare lot. The modern photograph shows the house still standing, with a driveway beside it. The post does not name the photographers or give dates for either picture. The photographs are not reproduced on this wiki because their copyright status is unclear; an archived copy of the pair is on datum.locker.

Notes on the sources

• The timeline items from the 1960s onward are reminiscences posted in the Facebook thread, and the thread text is the version pasted by Michael B. Currie; the first comment, by McFarlane, was cut off at a "See more" link.
• Three commenters are linked to existing pages as likely matches only, and none is confirmed: Gerry Zeleny (a Thunder Bay bassist), Michael McFarlane (a Thunder Bay drummer; Michael B. Currie supplied that identification) and Adrian Marson (a Thunder Bay record from 1967).
• Richard Archibald wrote "I was born in 72" in reply to McFarlane. That is Archibald's birth year and not McFarlane's.