The Town of Englehart was created by the building of the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway Railway and named after Chairman Jacob Lewis Englehart. It was incorporated as the Town of Englehart in January 1908, as a half-way divisional point between North Bay, Ontario and what became Cochrane, Ontario, where the T & NO Railway met with the new Transcontinental Railway line being built west from Quebec City across the north to the Western Provinces, creating the town of Cochrane. In 1905, Jacob Lewis Englehart, from Ohio, became a key figure in the development of the railway north of North Bay in Ontario. A successful businessman from Petrolia, Ontario, nearing the current age of retirement, he was appointed in 1905, by the Premier of Ontario, to the Ontario Commission in charge of building and operating the T & NO, which would, about 1945, become the Ontario Northland Railway. He served as Chairman of a new 3-man Commission from 1906 until the fall of 1919, when he retired after the United Farmers of Ontario won their first and only four-year term in the Province of Ontario. He died at York, now Toronto, in 1921 and was buried at Petrolia. The new community of Englehart began to take shape with the construction of the line's first major bridge at the Charlton branch of Blanche River ; that is, until the first gravel road, was opened in 1927 north from North Bay to New Liskeard in the Temiskaming District, with future extensions north and west as the initial Trans-Canada Highway route. The T & NO was eventually extended north to Moosonee on James Bay in the depression years of the 1930s. Today, Englehart's importance as a railway town has diminished, and the biggest employer is an oriented strand board facility built by Grants Forest Products, which was sold to Georgia-Pacific in early 2010 as a result of the recession of 2008.
Media
broadcasts from Englehart.
Transportation
The Englehart railway station was served by the Northlander until the passenger service was ended in September 2012. Rail passenger service was replaced by increased bus service, also provided by Ontario Northland Railway. Englehart is located on Ontario Highway 11, part of the Trans-Canada Highway system. On March 31, 2007, an Ontario Northland Railway freight train derailed about north of Englehart, spilling an estimated 100 tonnes of sulfuric acid into a creek feeding the Blanche River.
