Urban Neighbourhoods of Sudbury - Flour Mill

The Flour Mill neighbourhood is centred on Notre-Dame Avenue and Kathleen Street, immediately north of downtown Sudbury, from Jogues Street to Wilma Street, including the New Flour Mill business area north of Wilma to the Pioneer Manor. The neighbourhood around Leslie Street and Mountain Street was known as Primeauville, in honour of a local priest. The residential area Mont-Brébeuf with Collège Notre-Dame is part of this neighbourhood. In French, the community is known as le Moulin-à-Fleur. It is the French Quarter of the city. It should be noted that the French word "fleur" means here "finest, best, choiciest", and refers to "fleur de farine" (that is, the finest part of the flour). The French name translates therefore correctly as "Flour Mill" and not "Flower Mill". (In fact, it is the English pair "flour"/"flower" that derives from the single medieval French word flor/fleur, already carrying the two meanings. The term "flour" was spelled "flower" in English until the 19th century.)

One of the city's first neighbourhoods outside the original settlement, the Flour Mill was historically settled by Franco-Ontarian farmers and labourers. The neighbourhood's most notable surviving building, a large flour mill silo, was operated by the Manitoba and Ontario Flour Mill company. Other notable buildings include the Catholic parish church of Église St-Jean-de-Brébeuf and the École catholique Sacré-Coeur.

From the early 1900s into the 1960s, the neighbourhood was frequently flooded by spring runoff into Junction Creek. In some years, the flooding was so severe that it extended into downtown. Due to improved flood control practices within the Ponderosa Floodplain, however, the neighbourhood has not experienced a significant Junction Creek flood since the 1960s.

Following the mill's closure, there were frequent proposals to demolish the silo and redevelop the property. These proposals, and their attendant controversy, continued until the silo was designated a city heritage property in 1990. It celebrated its Centennial in 2011. The historic home of the mill's foreman was converted to a community museum, the Flour Mill Museum, in 1974.

In 2007, the neighbourhood has faced adversarial conflict as its local business improvement association has battled a city plan to widen Notre-Dame Avenue, a major city arterial which passes through the neighbourhood, to six lanes to accommodate expanded traffic. The business association also launched a neighbourhood beautification plan, including adding an "avenue of trees" to Notre-Dame, new benches and community banners, and the construction of a waterpark facility in the neighbourhood's O'Connor Park.

In August 2007, the city's Northern Life community newspaper published two articles calling attention to an abandoned cement factory just off a hiking trail near the neighbourhood, which had been used as an illegal dumping ground for garbage and chemicals as well as a local youth hangout. The factory's owners, Alexander Centre Industries, pledged to clean up the site a few days after the first article appeared, claiming that the facility had been abandoned for so long that nobody currently employed by the company even knew it existed until the controversy hit the press.

The residential Cambrian Heights neighbourhood extends northward from the Flour Mill along Cambrian Heights Drive. Collège Boréal and its campus is in this area.