Sydney, Nova Scotia
This is a long, long chapter, so let me explain that it starts at Halifax, runs quickly to Truro, settles briefly at New Glasgow, pauses again at Lake Bras D'Or, then spends probably three-quarters of its time in and around Sydney, where I dig a bit into the saga of coal and steel.
Nova Scotia measures about 375 miles top to bottom. The top fifth is Cape Breton Island, which is separated from the mainland by the narrow Strait of Canso. That name sounds like a military acronym, but it comes from a Mi'kmaw word meaning "passage."
The obvious place to start is Halifax, the provincial capital. Obvious because its airport handles about 125 flights daily (call it 60 or 70 arrivals and an equal number of departures.). The only other Nova Scotia airport with scheduled flights is Sydney, at the top of Cape Breton Island, and when I was there in June, 2026, it had only two daily flights in and out, one to Montreal and the other to Toronto. Makes sense when you realize that Halifax is not only central but with its suburbs has about half of the province's population. That's a bit over 450,000 from a total of just under a million. But, you ask, why lead with this picture? I lead with it because it suggests change. That's important, because in much of Nova Scotia there hasn't been a lot of it lately.
Old residential areas in Halifax are woody, whether the wood is in trees or was milled long ago into lumber. (Henry at Binney. We're three blocks from Dalhousie University, which is older than those upstarts in Toronto and Vancouver.)
The waterfront, always prime real estate, is a different story.
A block back from the water, the changes are less attractive. (CBCL describes itself as an engineering and environmental consulting firm. I get the engineering bit.)
A few blocks away, at Pier 21, a building went up in the 1920s. It's still there.
It was where most immigrants to Canada from the '20s to the '40s first touched their new country.
These pictures are from the walls of the museum now occupying the building.
These new arrivals must have been given a few minutes to freshen up for the camera.
The bridge linked the immigration building on the right to the railroad station on the left. The new arrivals mostly walked over and got on. And you thought transiting at Heathrow was bad.
The same new arrivals came 100 miles up the track and stopped at least momentarily at Truro, population about 12,000 people today--and in 1950. That stagnation (strong word!) is a theme in Nova Scotia.
The train station's gone, replaced by the très élégant Truro Centre. Via Rail's Ocean rolls through three times a week each way. There were twice as many trains in the old days, and I bet each one carried more passengers than trains today.
Across the street, you can admire the Victoria Suites.
If you like high collars, you should see the public library, which was the Truro Normal College from 1877 to 1961. I bet that in the early days students as well as teachers wore those things.
Truro has many well-maintained old houses. They've been surveyed in an excellent walking tour prepared by the city's Planning and Development Department: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/30b7efc347614ccf8a9876bd644b0ba8
Nice but perhaps tough to sell, not only because Truro isn't growing but because the median age in Nova Scotia is over 46. For Canada, the figure is just over 41; for the U.S., it's just over 38.
Greek Revival. That's what the experts call it, mostly because the triangular top faces the street like a bare-bones Parthenon. We'll see lots more like it, but few if any are this well kept-up.
The mainline track goes west into New Brunswick, but we're going east. In another 40 miles land we in New Glasgow, where we'll look downtown before heading to Eureka (bottom of the map) and then up top to Trenton. Yes, there's a reason.
Provost Street, the main drag, was more impressive in 1900, when Glasgow had 4,000 people, than it is today when the city has 9,500, a number almost unchanged from 1950.
You can sense the money that was here in 1900, when the city was smaller.
People built to last.
What would the mason say if he could see that sign?
The owner of this office building from 1907 has adjusted.
And now to Eureka. The river on the right is the East River, and the one on the left is the West Branch. That's confusing, but I'm here for the bare patch hugging the East River. See the bridge downstream, near the confluence?
I'm standing on it and looking downstream. You can sort of see the West Branch coming in on the left. Nice place.
I've found a badly drained road leading towards the bare patch.
Here we are.
I found no signs to indicate what this is or was.
Does this look like a natural ridge to you?
The bare spot today was once the coking ovens and blast furnaces of the New Glasgow Iron, Coal and Railway Company. At their peak, they produced 160 tons of pig iron daily for shipment mostly north a few miles to Trenton.
https://www.saltwire.com/gallery/ferrona-the-town-that-almost-was-gallery
The place was called Ferrona, and it made pig iron from 1892 to 1904. I was hoping there'd be something left besides furnace waste.
https://www.saltwire.com/gallery/ferrona-the-town-that-almost-was-gallery↗↗
As I say, most of the pig iron was sent here, to Trenton. The mill had several names over the years; this one lasted only a few, and the company was most often called simply "Scotia." The mill was usually called "The Trenton Works." Funny how the artist makes no effort to hide the smoke. No pollution here. Smoke is a sign of success and prosperity.
The Trenton Works quit making steel just after World War II, long after Ferrona had closed, but it continued making steel products, especially railroad equipment, all the way to 2007.
This was the guy behind both Trenton and Ferrona. Seems he was having a bad day, but you have to understand that he liked getting his hands dirty, and as his business expanded he had to deal with financiers.
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=946488443494685&set=pcb.946490210161175↗↗↗↗↗
Here he's marginally better, or at least older. He went on from New Glasgow to grander but still more frustrating projects, and we'll meet him again near Sydney, but the good news is that he eventually retired, went back to New Glasgow, served as mayor, and returned to his own beginnings as a shipbuilder, this time with boats built for fun.
(Gregory Marchildon in Canadian Dictionary of Biography https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/frasergraham_14E.html )
The site of the Trenton Works is now hard to see (the guards are friendly but firm). Part of the site is occupied by Eastcut, a new company manufacturing prefabricated wooden structures.
Outside, there's this remarkable survivor.
It made axles for railway cars. That's what I call not messing around.
And there's this, parked in front of New Glasgow's Museum of Industry, Any guess?
It used to be where the Trans-Canada Highway runs, but when the road came through the tower was taken apart and rebuilt on that rectangle of grass.
It wasn't rebuilt completely, so we have to find an old photo to see what it looked like originally, when it housed a Cornish pump draining the adjoining coal mine. (Underground coal mines here were done by 1980, though one surface mine continued until 2022.)
https://novascotia.ca/natr/meb/data/pubs/is/is08/is08_Chapter04.pdf
A sign on the spot adds some details.
Time to move 70 miles more, this time from New Glasgow to Canso Strait, that ribbon of water separating Cape Breton Island from the rest of Nova Scotia.
A writer in the 1880s explained that "the problem at present agitating the Cape Breton mind is how to get the railway across...."
(Robert Murray and J. McLennan in George Monro Grant, ed., Picturesque Canada, Volume II, 1882, p. 842.)
For a long time the answer was "by barge," but in 1955 this ugly road and rail causeway speeded up the crossing.
A navigation lock was provided, but it doesn't handle big ships.
Here is it under construction.
And here's the view from the Cape Breton side looking east, toward the Atlantic.
We're heading east 30 miles from the causeway to St. Peters, where a canal, completed in 1869, opened a southern entrance to Lake Bras d'Or. Until then, boats could enter the lake only from the two natural entrances on the north. Yes, the lake is salt, and yes, there's a narrow passage just west of the words "Christmas Island."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasd%27OrLake#/media/File:Brasd'Or_Lake.PNG
Here's the canal, seen from the strait side.
The locks have to deal with tides, which increased when the causeway blocked the natural flow through the strait.
You can walk the entire length of the canal in ten minutes, maybe less.
Presto: we're at the edge of the lake.
Gotta love maps.
Boats coming through the canal from the strait can make their way to Baddeck, on the western shore.
Here's Charles Dudley Warner, an editor at Harpers and a co-author with Mark Twain. He's writing in 1873: "The Bras d'Or is the most beautiful salt-water lake I have ever seen.... We saw the moon rise ... and flood with light the islands and headlands of the beautiful bay. Anchored at some distance from the shore was a slender coasting vessel...."
(Baddeck, and That Sort of Thing, 1874, excerpted in Impressions of Cape Breton, ed. by Brian Tennyson, 1986, pp. 163-182.)
Alexander Graham Bell fell in love with the place, spent summers there and finally retired to a "cottage" that is still in his family.
Many visitors passing through Baddeck today visit the Bell Museum, but most of them bump into it because they are driving the 180-mile Cabot Trail, which since 1932 has circled the Cape Breton Highlands. (It wasn't fully paved until about 1960.) True, John Cabot never touched Cape Breton Island, but give the tourist promotion boys a break. Thanks in part to their imagination and hard work, the Cabot Trail attracts over 5,000 vehicles daily in summer.
Come of think of it, the tourism authorities probably deserve credit as well for the name Cape Breton Highlands. This map from 1873, for example, refers only to the two counties sharing the area (Inverness and Victoria). Beyond that, the map says only that this is an "Unexplored Region, High Table Land, 1000 Feet Elevation, Abounding in Moose and Carriboo Deer." I don't know exactly when the name Cape Breton Highlands was first used, but it was firmly established with the creation in 1936 of the Cape Breton Highlands National Park. No messing with the name now. The key person was probably Angus L. MacDonald, the very long-serving and very Scots-minded premier of the province in the 1930s and '40s. While we're at it, let us thank Alistair J. Campbell, the director of the Nova Scotia Tourist Association. It was he who coined that awesome stretcher printed on every Nova Scotia license plate: "Canada's Ocean Playground."
https://www.geographicus.com/P/AntiqueMap/capebretonisland-gisbornehill-1873↗↗↗↗
Anyway, Baddeck's a nice place, and Warner's "slender coasting vessel" is still there.
Waterfront homes.
Warner never saw the likes of these. "Baddeck was a clean-looking village of white wooden houses, of perhaps seven or eight hundred inhabitants, that stretched along the bay for a mile or more, straggling off into farm-houses at each end... Three or four rather decayed and shaky wharves ran into the water..." "'Aye, aye, I have heard tell, said the jailer, shaking his head in pity. It's an awful' place, the United States. I suppose it's the wickedest country that ever was in the world. I don't know, I don't know what is to become of it... full of murders and robberies and corruption." My goodness. I didn't know that Rupert Murdoch got off to such an early start.
"The next morning the semi-weekly steamboat from Sydney came into the bay, and drew all the male inhabitants of Baddeck down to the wharf..." There's no steamboat in 2026, so we'll drive another 50 miles to Sydney and drop anchor there.
Here's Sydney (on the right) as it was in 1795, ten years after its founding as the capital of the Colony of Cape Breton Island. The colony survived until 1820, when it was folded into Nova Scotia, which deprived Sydney of its status as a capital.
R. Cole Harris, Historical Atlas of Canada, 1987, vol. 1, plate 32.
Sydney eventually lost its status as a city, too, when in 1995 it and neighoring communities were combined into the Cape Breton Regional Municality. With about 30,000 people, Sydney is the largest community within the municipality, which has a total population of about 100,000.
https://capebretonspectator.com/2018/11/07/civic-improvement-cbrm-ideas/↗
Here's part of the area of the 1795 map. The military is still at the north end, except for some Imperial Oil storage tanks, but the surrounding ground is solidly built up.
Here's a postcard of part of that ground. It's George Street, still exceptionally wide, as you can see on the immediately preceding map.
(This postcard, and many others coming up, comes from a remarkable YouTube channel, Paulspictureplace2663.)
A century later, and the houses have changed a bit but not a lot. I know, I know: you want to knock on doors and ask for gray-eyed Pallas Athena.
We could try our luck here.
I tried here. No luck, but I did find a basement, though it wasn't original. There were three rooms downstairs (kitchen, living room, dining) and three bedrooms upstairs, plus the building's one bathroom. I imagine domestic pandemonium with children roaring up and down the dozen stairs three or four at a time. I bet aging parents in such houses eventually found the stairs a curse.
Very little is left of Sydney from before 1900, but here's St. George's Anglican, built in 1785, the year of the city's founding. Alas, it's locked except when a cruise ship is in port. About 100 visit annually. I was here for a week in June. The cruise-ship season had not yet begun, and I saw none. That was fine by me, but I'd have liked to see inside the church.
The churchyard was unfenced. This stone reads in part: "In Memory of Roseanna Maria who departed this life on the 31st day of October, 1850, aged 20 years, the beloved wife of J.T. Robinson... "
"... prepare for Death and follow me." I'd like to, really I would, but I have an appointment in Samarra.
Fast forward to 1877. There's been a lot of development, though few, if any, of the buildings or businesses shown here survive.
We do slightly better with this map from 1900. See that large block at the corner of Dorchester and Esplanade?
It's the Sydney Hotel, which opened in 1894 with hot and cold running water in the guestrooms. Electric lights, too.
Here it is with a neighbor.
"Damn, we've lost our water view." The hotel burned down in 1919, so at least complaints like that one stopped.
This was Sydney's fanciest house, known as Moxham's Castle, though probably not when the owner was in the room.
Here's the family. Moxham's son Tom, sitting on the steps, was killed while supervising loading of rail cars. His wife Ellen, died in childbirth two months later. "By family accounts, the deaths ... drained the spirit from Arthur and Helen Moxham." They moved back to the U.S.
https://sites.pitt.edu/~zander/Research%20archive/Johnson%20Company/MoxhamatDISCO.html
During World War I, the castle became a hospital.
This photo from that time reveals the grand staircase.
Moxham died in 1931 (a short obituary appeared in The New York Times), and the "castle" burned in 1966. The only survivor was this gatehouse.
Oh, and some of the property's stone wall, which hugs the gatehouse tightly.
Sydney Harbor is less than 100 yards behind the gatehouse. The intervening space, once occupied by the "castle," now holds Cabot House, an apartment building confirming the truth of Arthur C. Clarke's confident prediction in 1964 that the future will be "absolutely fantastic."
Here's the city's other showplace. It's gone, like Moxham Castle, but the grounds survive as the Petersfield Provincial Park.
A bit of foundation.
A few steps.
Lots of grass.
An air photo from when the house still stood on a peninsula that juts into the harbor. Sydney is off to the right.
The owner was John Stuart McLennan, who made money in coal and then from owning The Sydney Post. His real love was history.
I mention this because McLennan is remembered today chiefly for pushing for the recreation of Louisbourg, a town established in 1719 as the capital of the French colony of Cape Breton Island. (The French called it Île Royale.) The British took the fortress in 1745, returned it in 1748, and captured it again in 1758, then demolished it.
Archaeologists have found lots of remnants, like these foundations.
McLennan had studied the town plans, which survived in French archives, and he realized that the place could be recreated with astonishing accuracy. He died in Ottawa in 1939 (he had been a Canadian senator since 1916), but his dream didn't die, and work began in the 1960s.
(See his Louisbourg from its Foundation to its Fall, 1713-1758, 1918; many reprints.)
Here's the meticulously rebuilt structure housing the governor's apartments, the royal chapel, and some barracks.
Knowledgable guides hang around and are hard to stump. I didn't tell them that their recreated Louisbourg, which along with the Cabot Trail is Cape Breton's leading tourist attraction, has no spirit. There, I've said it.
I do make an exception for this birchbark canoe, even if it's new.
Meanwhile, that Sydney Hotel--the one that burned in 1919--was replaced in 1928 with the Isle Royale Hotel. It never burned, but in 1985 it was demolished. That's a popular tune in Sydney.
It was demolished to make way for this, Sydney's Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Tower. See? More proof of Arthur C. Clarke's perspicacity!
There's a nearby Holiday Inn.
It's next to Vista Heights, a creative name for whatever you call buildings that house old people. Yes, it's true: some of the tenants get a view of the harbor.
You and I can walk along the harbor's boardwalk, begun about 2000, mostly for cruise-ship passengers, who were now becoming frequent visitors.
We can rest our dogs while I mention that Sydney is named for the same guy who has a bigger city named for him in Australia.
Here he is, Thomas Townshend, First Viscount Sydney (1732–1800). Just so you know.
https://www.portrait.gov.au/portraits/2012.176/lord-viscount-sydney
By 1900, downtown Sydney had joined Halifax, Truro, and New Glasgow as places built to last. This streetcar (assuming that it's heading around the bend) is a block from the water and is in sight of the still unburned Sydney Hotel. Pity that city officials have not put together a historic walk like the one in Truro, but perhaps that's because none of the buildings shown here survive. The only one I can even identify is the Sydney Academy, on the right. It sounds private but wasn't.
Here's its replacement, half a mile east of the original site.
Here, thanks to the postcard's caption, is 1900 Sydney's now-vanished post office.
There's the Sydney Academy in the distance.
Here's the same spot (Dorchester at Pitt) today. You can see why I want to talk to that fellow Clarke.
It would be nice if we could trace how Sydney got from there to here, but for now I have to settle for this photo from before demolitions but after the introduction of electric signs and automobiles. The streetcar tracks are in place, but there's no catenary line. Hmmm. Turns out that the streetcars had been run by the city, which went into receivership in 1931. Bye-bye, streetcars.
Here's a rare survivor: it's the Bank of Montreal, from 1901 and in business until 2016, which is kind of amazing.
Even more amazing: the bank donated the building to the Old Sydney Society, which has made it into a museum. It was closed when I came by, but I charmed my way in and interrupted some training in progress.
Sydney, I gradually discovered, has very few new houses. New businesses, yes--Walmart, McDonalds, and the ubiquitous Tim Horton's--but not many new houses.
The ones it has are not stylistically cutting edge.
These were all at Howe Court or nearby on Hospital Street, which is suggestive, because if you wonder who can afford a new house in Sydney today, your first guess should probably be doctors at the nearby Cape Breton Regional Hospital.
You'll notice that I haven't said anything about the city's economic engine, which from 1901 until 2000 was that steel mill in the distance. It began as DISCO, became BESCO, then DOSCO and finally SYSCO. I hate to spell out those names, but I'll help a bit: Dominion Iron and Steel, British Empire Steel, Dominion Steel, and Sydney Steel. The name changes hint at the company's problems, which became acute after World War I. Until then, the sky had been the limit. Here, for example, is an 1899 paragraph from a hypertensive reporter for The Montreal Star: "Since the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway no enterprise has excited such general interest in Canada as the organization of the Dominion Iron and Steel Company.... The immense amount of money that is being expended in the construction of the works, and the fact that the capital for the undertaking is being furnished by a combination of the wealthiest men in Canada and the United States, men who have never been known to fail in anything that they have undertaken, has excited widespread curiosity.'"
(The reporter was Watson Griffin, and a half-dozen of his pieces on the mill were collected in a booklet called At the Front Door of Canada: The Great Works of the Dominion Iron and Steel Company... The most Favourable Situation in the World for an Iron Industry, Montreal, 1899.)
Here's the mill's first manager. You know him. He's Arthur Moxham. Leaving his "castle" every morning, he went to the mill by steam launch.
And here's the money guy behind the whole thing. Henry Melville Whitney. He was from Boston, where his family owned the Metropolitan Steamship Company, running ships between Boston and New York City. Additionally, Whitney owned the West End Street Railway Company and dabbled (as we say) in real estate. .
A recent historian admits that "no individual has had more of a lasting impact on industrial Cape Breton than Henry Melville Whitney."
(Don Macgillivray, "Henry Melville Whitney Comes to Cape Breton: The Saga of a Gilded Age Entrepreneur," Acadiensis, 9: 1, 1979, p. 44. The photo, with its Trumpyish caption, comes from https://www.google.com/books/edition/TheSuccessful_American/NmZMAAAAYAAJ?q=whitney+henry&gbpv=1#f=false )
Still, Whitney sold his interest in the company almost as soon as the first batch of steel was poured. The buyer, in 1902, was the Canadian Northern Railroad's James Ross, and a year later he sold his interest to this gentleman, James Henry Plummer, whot had the decency to hold onto the mill until 1913, though except in summer he stayed home in Toronto. Who did Plummer hire to actually run the mill? He needed somebody who knew Nova Scotia and who knew steel, and so he turned to Graham Fraser. Remember him, back in New Glasgow?
And so by 1913 Sydney looked like this. You can the the limp phallus of the old town (sorry, but you know what I mean), some expansion on the mainland, the mill marked by railroad tracks across the creek, and a new residential area shown here at the upper right. It was called Whitney Pier, in honor of the departed Henry Melville Whitney, and it was where most of the mill workers lived.
https://wardmaps.com/products/sydney-nova-scotia-canada-1914-streetcar-lines
The name survives. Notice also the words Open Hearth Park. Can you anticipate?
Here's the mill in the early days. The buildings nearest the water are labeled Stock House (call it the mill's pantry) and Blast Furnaces.
And here is the earliest edition of the Canadian government's 1:50,000 topo sheet for Sydney. It's dated 1955, but displays the mill prominently.
An artist's rendering.
Now we're talking.
Heroic stuff.
Inside the steel mill. What are those things on the left? I wish I knew. Ingot molds?
Now it's time for the bad news, which I've tried to prepare you for.
There's a map of the steel-mill turned park.
There are a few signs.
Otherwise, the site has been remediated to high heaven, which I think is a shame.
You can find bits of surviving track.
And, by golly, here's a ladle that used to carry molten iron from the blast furnace to the open-hearth furnace, which converted the iron to steel. I suppose the "S" refers to Sysco, the mill's last name.
And here's a sign that some sentimental oldtimer picked up and gave to the Whitney Pier Historical Society Museum, which (another story) occupies a former synagogue.
Don't believe me? Come down to the basement for the mikveh.
You're so impatient. You want to know where the mill got its iron ore. The answer is Newfoundland, specifically a tiny island in the bay behind St. John's. I've dropped a pin there. It's about 350 airline miles from Sydney.
Bell Island hasn't recovered from the attention. Funny thing, the iron ore was not mined under the island but from tunnels that ran from the island far under the waters of Conception Bay.
It's the same story for coal, which came from Sydney's own coal field, Canada's most important in 1900. Here, in maps for 1865 and 1891, you can see production rising toward the World War I peak. Sydney itself is hiding on the map, but if you look closely you'll see that the coal mines lie both to the east and west of town. They're also close to the water, and (yes!) they followed the coalbeds as they sloped for miles under the sea.
(R.. Louis Gentilcore, ed., Historical Atlas of Canada, 1993, vol. 2, pl 46.)
Here, in maps for 1911 and 1931 you can see the decline. Coal production had risen from 1 million tons in 1880 to 7 million by 1913, but by the early 30s was down to under 5 million. Not to spoil the fun, but today no coal comes from the island.
(Donald Kerr and Deryck W. Holdsworth, Historical Atlas of Canada, 1990, vol. 3, pl. 24.)
Still, coal is in the blood here, at least of older folks, and I want to poke around the mines, starting in North Sydney and then heading to Sydney Mines, where we will once again meet Graham Fraser, the guy from New Glasgow.
Here's the North Sydney railroad station in 1892. It suggests a substantial town.
And so North Sydney was.
It wasn't all wood, either.
The Vooght brothers, British immigrants, opened Cape Breton's biggest commercial building here. It had elevators, we read.
(Rannie Gilles, Historic North Sydney, 2005, p. 43).
Here's the most substantial block of the same street today.
Scotia Bank sits on the site of the Vooght Brothers store. See the building across the street?
The words in the tympanum read Bank of Nova Scotia. The building is close to the former offices of Western Union, which had a cable running from here to Newfoundland.
Same street. Wonder why there's a Subway?
Answer: we're a two-minute walk from the Newfoundland Ferry.
Here it is from the Sydney side.
It's a seven-hour sailing to Newfoundland's Port aux Basques terminal. In summer there's also a 16-hour sailing to Placentia Bay. Why take the longer route? Answer: it takes ten hours to drive from Port aux Basques to St. John's. It's only two from Placentia Bay.
The ferry service began in 1898, at the same time as the Newfoundland Railroad reached Port aux Basques from St. John's. Coal, however, had been shipped from North Sydney since 1832. Originally it was produced by the General Mining Association, a pioneering British company with a monopoly on all mining on Cape Breton Island until 1858. By the time of this postcard, our friend Graham Fraser had left New Glasgow, come up here, and bought the Association's mines.
Here his company is referred to by its familiar name. Why did Fraser come? Answer: rather than expand the Trenton Works, he wanted to build a new steel mill as close as possible to Bell Island's iron ore and Sydney's coal.
If you need a map of the piers, just ask.
Scotia's properties around Sydney in about 1910 included four coal mines along with new blast furnaces, open hearth furnaces, and a foundry.
(Anon., Scotia, How Canada's Pioneer Steel Corporation was Evolved from a Country Forge, 1912?, p. 10.)
But who, long before Graham Fraser's arrival, got the coal industry started here? It's time to meet Richard Brown (1805-1882). From 1829 to 1864 he was agent-manager for the General Mining Association. (You remember: this was the organization that until 1858 had a monopoly on all Cape Breton mining.) Brown reminds me of Captain Ahab. He wasn't chasing a whale, unless you like metaphors, but he was certainly chasing and measuring and figuring out how to get Cape Breton's coal. A later geologist had this to say of his work: "The careful and accurate work he accomplished in mapping the Sydney coalfield, his delineation of the seam outcroppings, then concealed by a pathless forest, his measurements of the strata along the sea frontage, presumably with the aid of small sail-boats, remain a constant marvel to coal-seam students of a later generation."
(Francis William Gray, "Fifty Years of the Dominion Coal Company," Dalhousie Review, 1942, p. 463. The image comes from https://archive.org/details/collectionsofnov17nova/page/n176/mode/1up↗)
Here's one of Brown's many sketches of the coastline--in this case with three thin beds dipping under the ocean.
(Richard Brown, The Coal Fields and Coal Trade of the Island of Cape Breton, 1871, p. 166).
Richard Brown's son, Richard Henry Brown (1837-1920), took over the management of the General Mining Association's properties when his father retired in 1864. The company's monopoly had ended, but Brown still managed the mines until 1901, when Graham Fraser's Scotia bought them.
The younger Brown looks less driven but more meticulous than his father. Here's a page of his meticulous journal. Notice the entry for the 29th: "Boy Bob Burchell (or Cook) was killed in the pit at 3 pm by trying to get on trip of tubs and falling between them."
(https://archives.novascotia.ca/meninmines/archives/?ID=665)
The Sydney coalfield has many monuments to the men who died in the mines.
Like this one. About 250 men were riding a line of mining cars down the long incline to the working face. The cable controlling their descent snapped, and the cars accelerated to an estimated 80 miles an hour. Twenty-one miners died, and 60 or more were hurt. The lucky ones jumped off while they could.
And of course there are tombstones in all the communities that had mines.
Still, there's frustratingly little to see of the mines themselves. Like the Sydney steel mill, they've been remediated to high heaven.
Perhaps the commonest reminder of the miners is their houses, many of which survive, in this case hoisted onto a foundation suggesting the addition of a basement.
"Before" and "after," showing how renovation can perk things up.
The town of Sydney Mines itself got a heavy-duty post office and customs house in 1904.
I want the office up top.
Its other tall building, opened in 1907, was St. Andrew's Presbyterian.
Main Street had a hotel.
After World War II, Main Street had traffic.
And here, probably seen from the post office tower, is Graham Fraser's Scotia steel mill, running on iron ore from Bell Island and on coal from the mines purchased from the General Mining Association.
Not bad, huh? The mill operated (different sources have different numbers) roughly from 1902 to 1921. It had a much shorter life, in other words, than Whitney's mill across the harbor.
https://www.saltwire.com/cape-breton/life-and-death-of-scotia-steel-294214
The workers, not surprisingly, often came from Trenton. "It has become an almost daily occurrence to note the arrival of from 1-20 families from New Glasgow and Trenton, old employees of the company."
(The Pictou Advocate, 27 June 1905, quoted by L. Anders Sandberg, "The Closure of the Ferrona Iron Works, 1904," Acadiensis, 14:1, 1984, p. 100).
Astonishingly, and unlike the coal mines here and the steel mill over in Sydney, bits of Scotia's steel mill survive, I suppose because they were abandoned before "remediation" was a thing.
I'm guessing blast furnace.
Lots of burnt brick. Looking for explanatory signs? Forget it.
Pains me to say it, but Google Maps comes to the rescue. That, plus people in the neighborhood who happily point to a path.
Wandering around, it's hard to miss the brooding aura of the coast. Signs warning you to stay back from the cliff? You're kidding, right?
Sometimes you can see the slope of the beds slipping under the sea.
Other places look like coal rubble.
I'm ready now for the coal fields east of Sydney. Yes, you saw this map earlier, when I was talking about the Cape Breton Highlands.
https://archives.novascotia.ca/communityalbums/capebreton/archives/?ID=690↗
We'll look at the three headlands: Lingan, Little Glace Bay, and Clyde.
In today's names, that's New Waterford, Glace Bay and Donkin.
Again, the mines start at the surface but follow the coal as it dips under the sea.
This is the home of the New Waterford and District Historical Society. A little creepily, it sits apparently smack on top of the entrance to the Dominion No. 12 Colliery, the site of Cape Breton's biggest mining disaster. Sixty-five men died in 1917 following a methane explosion 2,000 feet underground. Dominion Coal, I should mention, had been Henry Melville Whitney's first involvement with Cape Breton. He came looking for coal for his steamships and bought, then consolidated under the name Dominion, a bunch of independent mines that had developed in the years after the General Mining Association's monopoly ended. The steel mill came later. By the time of the 1917 disaster, Whitney was long gone, and the mine belonged to the British Empire Steel Company. Despite its name, it was based in Montreal, not London.
The historical society's building is just below the green marker. The surrounding grounds have been "remediated" into another park.
True, there is this monument, with plaques listing chronologically the men who died in New Waterford's mines.
The first victim was in 1866, and there were four more by 1900. Numbers crept up with coal production, until nine men died in 1915 and eight in 1916--all in Dominion's numbered collieries.
Then came the 1917 explosion at No. 12. A coroner's jury blamed lack of ventilation for the accumulation of methane. Three officials were indicted for manslaughter, but the judge, a former solicitor for the British Empire Steel Company, instructed the jury to return verdicts of not guilty.
The last man to die in the mines worked at the Phalen Colliery, which continued in operation for a few years after his death.
The Phalen Mine had been developed by DEVCO (another damned acronym), a federal Crown corporation created in 1967 to take over Dominion's ailing properties. The mine supplied coal to the adjoining Lingan generating station. Today, with the mine closed since 1999, the plant imports coal by rail from Sydney Harbor. Much of it seems to come from Colombia, specifically from the Cerrejón open-pit coal mines in La Guajira. They belong to Glencore. Well, what do you expect? We have Amazon, Walmart, and, for all your mining needs, Glencore.
I complain about remediation, but a few coal hoppers somehow survive in the park atop Dominion No. 12..
Look at the wheels.
Small world.
I can't leave New Waterford without stopping at the Miner's Monument erected in 1985 at William Davis Square.
It's covered with the names of men who died in the mines.
William Davis was one of 12,000 strikers in 1925. This page, probably from The Maritime Labor Herald, says Davis was shot through the heart by a company policeman. That would be the one of the British Empire Steel Company's policemen. Davis left a widow and seven children.
The strikers were demanding a new contract, but the company wanted to break the union. John Ernest McLurg, a BESCO vice-president, told a reporter that the company would just wait out the strikers because "two months or six months, it matters not, eventually they will have to come to us. They can't stand the gaff." That phrase became notorious, although one can argue about whether the miners did or did not stand the gaff. Call it a split decision, with no improvement in their conditions but with the union emerging intact.
(Don MacGillivray, author of the entry for William Davis in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography).
The memory of strikes burns hot still in Cape Breton, and at least two full-length biographies have been written about James Bryson McLachlan, the miners' best-known leader. One of the books begins with these words of his: "I believe in telling children the truth about the history of the world, that it does not consist in the history of Kings and Lords... but.. in the history of the ...workers." Sounds mighty red, don't it? Carole MacDonald, herself from a coal-mining family in the area, recently gave a talk expressing the other side. She titled it: "J.B. McLachlan: Labour Hero or Opportunist?" You can bet there were some comments.
(David Frank, J.B. McLachlan, A Biography, 1999, frontispiece. See also John Mellor, The Company Store: James Bryson McLachlan and the Cape Breton Coal Miners, 1900-1925, 1983. Carole MacDonald, "J.B. McLachlan: Labour Hero or Opportunist?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzorxCt3KAY&t=3629s )
Before we leave New Waterford, let's stop at 12th and Plummer. Remember that name? James Henry Plummer was the Toronto financier who took over the Sydney steel mill and the Dominion coal mines in the years between Whitney and the British Empire Steel Company. Here are a few of the houses of the men who worked for him.
Looking at them, I'm reminded of General George Marshall's tombstone at Arlington National Cemetery. It's exactly the same size and shape as the cemetery's other tombstones. I like that: no kings or lords.
New Waterford's Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church was built in 1912. Now called St. Leonard's, it's three blocks from those miners' houses. I bet the pews were once full of miners and their wives.
OK, I've jumped to Glace Bay. Yes, that's Ice Bay, but the French name has stuck, though it's pronounced as if it's English. And, yes, in recent years there hasn't been much ice.
I'm here momentarily for Guglielmo Marconi, who in 1902 built four 210-foot towers here, from which he sent the first successful wireless message across the Atlantic.
The towers are gone, but you can see foundations.
You can also see coal along this coast.
Alas, you won't find any remnants of the Caledonia colliery, which operated here from 1864 to 1892.
https://novascotia.ca/natr/meb/data/pubs/is/is08/is08_Chapter04.pdf
Or anything from Dominion No. 4, which had a much longer life, from 1866 to 1961.
You'll have to settle for an ersatz mine. Nina Cohen, whose family was part of the small Jewish community in Glace Bay and whose only connection to coal mines was the miners shopping at her husband George's Glace Bay Store, was the force behind the creation of this, the Cape Breton Miners Museum. Its prize exhibit is a demonstration mine dug by retired miners. Despite the name, it does not go under the sea.
The entrance is very tidy.
But the concrete quits, and soon you're in a tunnel whose roof is 66 inches above the floor--a number governed by the thickness of the coal seam. Visitors taller than that have to bend, just as the miners did, unless they were short. Hard hats are mandatory and useful, though they force visitors to bend even more.
Here's a hypothetical working face, with a machine used to place roof props.
There are "tubs" or "cars" once pulled by ponies.
And there's definitely coal waiting.
Glace Bay had about 7,000 people in 1900. It peaked at 25,000 in 1950, then sank to about 17,000 today.
Like so many of these towns, people used to build to last.
The town was still doing all right in the 1950s.
Since then, landlords have adapted.
You might expect that aging miners might turn to religion, but that seems not to have been the case very often. St. John's United Chuch, here in Port Merion, has lost its steeple.
Instead, there's a lot of outdoors activity, like this New Waterford fishing derby for kids. The pond is close to where William Davis was shot in 1925.
There are lots of ATV's.
Some of them take advantage of the repurposed railroad grade of the Sydney and Louisburg Railroad, built to haul coal to ports at either end of its line.
Some folks fish.
There are some small but active commercial ports, too, no longer catching cod but lobster and crab. This is Port Merien again.
Lobster traps.
Unhappy fishermen.
The nearby Donkin Mine raised hopes when it opened in 2017, but three years later it closed. It opened again in 2022 but closed the next year after roof collapses. The sign on the right is eloquent.
I saw nobody around except a guard who nicely but firmly kept me out.
The last mine I went hunting for was the last mine to work Sydney's coal successfully. This was the Prince Mine, which operated from 1975 to 2001 at a site about seven miles west of Sydney Mines.
It was here, at the pin. The mine was intended to supply fuel for the nearby Point Aconi Power Plant (by the green pin) just like the Phalen Mine was supposed to supply the Lingan station.
On the ground.
On the plus side, it's not near a town, so remediators haven't erased everything, but fuel comes to the plant now by truck from Sydney. I can report that the truckers don't like cars in their way.
Here's the terminal where the fuel arrives, just as it does for the Lingan plant. Both plants are scheduled for decommissioning.
The terminal is fenced off, and the gates have signs warning of Canada Customs. End of the line. We're done. What shall we do? We can visit Sydney's one Starbucks. Actually it's Cape Breton's one and only Starbucks. Sydney also has six McDonald's and two Walmarts, proof that life goes on. Alternatively, we could hit Tim Horton's. Nova Scotia has 125 of them. It's no surprise: a large coffee there is barely over two dollars Canadian. Ditto, hash browns. That's over a dollar cheaper than hash browns where I live, once you do the currency conversion. No wonder Timmie does so well: about half of all the households in Sydney have somebody on a pension. Money's tight, despite federal equalization payments from Ottawa. They work out to about $4,000 per capita annually. Alberta grumbles, but Alberta's far away.