Coal Black Heart by John Demont Page B

capital would employ their money in an undertaking of magnitude under a lease of five or seven years; and it is equally certain that, without capital, the mines could not be worked for profit.” The one way the authorities acted decisively—ensuring that the market for domestic coal remained a captive one—did no one any good. Landowners who discovered coal on their acreage found it was the property of the Crown. If they “forgot” this, soldiers who were empowered to prevent the mining and smugglingof illegal coal arrived to remind them. “The action of the authorities,” geologist Francis W. Gray wrote in 1917, “must have seemed cruelly foolish and inexplicable to those colonists who, every spring, saw the coal that the winter’s frosts had loosened drop into the sea with the first thaws of spring, to be washed completely away by the first storm.”
    On the mainland, the nineteenth century opened with little obvious promise. The Cumberland County mines in Joggins and Springhill ran into the same problems. The Scots who had settled in Pictou County where coal had been discovered in the early 1790s, stubbornly tried to seize their underground wealth; the result, though, was little different. The story of John MacKay, who dug possibly the first coal mine in Pictou County in 1807, is perhaps emblematic. Like the other early operators, he lacked the money and technical skills to turn the first pits into much. During the Napoleonic Wars, things were good for anyone who found a way to provision the garrison in Halifax. In the last year of the War of 1812, Nova Scotia’s lieutenant governor ordered MacKay to ship coal to Halifax. Expecting such orders—and wartime profits—to continue, MacKay invested heavily in roads, bridges, wagons and lighters to move the coal. But peacetime brought a collapse in prices. In 1817 MacKay was forced into bankruptcy and thrown into debtor’s prisoner for a year, leaving his wife and children in “greatest distress.” While in jail, MacKay petitioned the government in Halifax for help. Instead, while MacKay was in the brig, a local Pictou merchant and MLA named John Mortimer was handed the right to mine coal in Pictou County. Political patronage—another practice long associated with the province’s coal industry—had its start.
    The postscript was no cheerier: MacKay died without making a cent off the coal. The next few years, as new mines were tentatively opened and leases moved back and forth between owners,brought little improvement. A succession of local worthies took a shot at turning the leases into something. By 1820 total production was 7,762 tonnes. Five years later, production had dropped to a point where the leaseholder of the moment said his overall profit amounted to a grand total of £ 200.
    One summer day I went looking, in the town of Stellarton, for an explanation of what happened next: how, within a few decades, coal mining in Nova Scotia went from nothing to an industry capable of bringing the Industrial Revolution to Canada. I wanted to start with a forgotten symbol: Mount Rundell, the twenty-room brick-and-wood official residence that the local manager of the General Mining Association had erected on a seventy-five-acre estate in the centre of the Pictou coalfield. Back in England it would have been a comfortable gentry house. “In the wilderness that Nova Scotia then was, in 1827,” James Cameron wrote, “it was a mansion.” The property included orchards, hothouses, a large park, a pigeon coop, stables, a porter’s house and a coach house. Some of the acreage had been cleared and planted with ornamental trees, shrubs and flowers. A cricket crease stood in one corner of the property; another corner, with a dance platform, chairs and tables, was lent to churches and charities for fundraisers and picnics. Large visitors’ houses marked the north and south ends of the property. Staff—some of them former slaves who had escaped from the United