Not Your Grandfathers Mining Industry, Nova Scotia, Canada

15 Mile Stream

Historical activity in the Fifteen Mile Stream gold district was documented in government reports, but it was Roderick MacGregor who provided the details that bring the story to life.

Today, the historical mine site is poised to create hundreds of jobs for Nova Scotians.

Gold was discovered at Fifteen Mile Stream, in Trafalgar, Halifax County, in 1867. The area was extremely difficult to access in that era, and only intermittent prospecting and small-scale extraction took place in the years that followed. (Indeed, the Department of Mines annual report of 1937 still described Fifteen Mile Stream as “the most inaccessible district in the Province but one of the most promising.”)

It was not until the early 1880s that activity picked up when the Hall brothers started getting good returns – i.e. an average of two ounces of gold produced per ton of ore crushed in 1880. However, mining declined again in the mid 1880s.

The most active company in the district in that period, the Hall-Anderson Gold Mining Company, ceased operations after its mill burned down in 1887. This created an opportunity for J.D. and P.A. MacGregor Ltd. to take over the Hall-Anderson property

James Drummond MacGregor and Peter A. MacGregor, brothers from New Glasgow, established J.D. and P.A. MacGregor Ltd., which was extensively involved in gold mining, lumbering, grocery wholesaling and other businesses. They were part of the very wealthy MacGregor family and James would go on to be an early investor in the Nova Scotia Steel Company and serve as its president (https://notyourgrandfathersmining.ca/trenton-steel). He was also mayor of New Glasgow, a provincial MLA, senator and eventually Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia.

James and Peter were Roderick A. MacGregor’s father and uncle respectively. Roderick maintained a lifelong interest in Fifteen Mile Stream and wrote letters about it through much of the 1900s that provide details and colour about the property that are not captured by official records.

James and Peter first operated in Fifteen Mile Stream as the Egerton Gold Mining Company but changed the company’s name in 1890 to the New Egerton Gold Mining Company. After the Anderson-Hall mill burned down, they built a new one and quickly ramped up activity.

In 1893, they bought the only other company working in the area, the Stanley Gold Mining Company, and the MacGregors controlled the district.

The tremendous potential of the MacGregors’ mine was described by a Nova Scotia Department of Mines inspector in 1896: “There was the largest amount of ore in sight here that I (the inspector) have ever seen at any mine in this country.” The next year, the inspector wrote that he was “of the opinion that there is exposed to view here the largest body of milling ore that I have seen in the Province.”

By that time, the mine had several shafts and a series of tunnels dug through the deposit. As was standard practice, the company was leaving in place pillars of unextracted rock to support the mine’s roof - the rock between the mine and the Earth’s surface above.

Roderick later suggested in 1930 that the pillars were too small because the mine manager had been trying to extract as much gold as possible: “Unknown to my father and uncle or at least unrealized by them, their mine manager in order to make a big showing at the time the new Company was being formed, gutted the mine so they began to have trouble with the walls crushing in.”

The problem was that the rock in the area was highly fractured and full of joints. Geological forces had left it weakened – not a solid, strong mass. As a result, part of the mine crushed (caved in).

Roderick suggested other poor mining practices also likely contributed to the crush: “Their methods of mining and recovery of the gold were pretty crude in light of today’s knowledge…Unfortunately, no real mining engineers were employed at that time so that there are no proper plans or mine management reports on record.”

Bad mining practices, lack of expertise and little documentation of the work were common at Nova Scotia’s historical mines, completely different from today when mining and quarrying are stringently regulated, and safety and environmental practices meet the highest standards.

The crush offers an example of why the modern industry sees good safety practices as good business practices: the crush created significant safety concerns with the mine and made it impossible to extract much of the gold.

Roderick wrote in 1976, “My father heard of open cut mining in New Mexico and went there to see if it could be adopted at Fifteen Mile Stream.”

An open cut (a surface mine) was started in 1897 as a way to try to extract the gold that had been lost to the crush – to come at it from above without fear of additional cave ins in the tunnels. Unfortunately, the open cut also caved in in 1898 as it reached the older workings below. The hole was reportedly 50 or 60 feet wide and 150 or more feet long when work in it ceased.

In addition to the cave in, Roderick wrote, “The open cut operation was only in progress a short time when a miner was killed by a rock slide. The method was considered too dangerous and was abandoned.” (Surface mining is very safe today, with many regulations and industry practices that ensure safety).

In 1897, “Scottish friends of the MacGregors,” as Roderick described them, “became interested in joining the venture.” They raised funds and sent an English mining engineer named William Pellew Harvey to inspect the mine. Pellew Harvey moved to British Columbia in 1889 and worked as a mining engineer and consultant before relocating back to London, England, in 1901. He wrote two reports about Fifteen Mile Stream in 1897, detailing its tremendous potential and how to properly run the mine.

Despite the cave ins, the Scottish/English group, now called the Egerton Syndicate, remained interested and took the mine over from the MacGregors in 1901. The Syndicate started by having a new shaft dug to the west of the old workings.

One of the MacGregors’ former mine managers was brought back from the Wabana iron mines in Newfoundland for his knowledge of Fifteen Mile Stream. He warned that the shaft’s location was poorly chosen, but the man in charge of the project, engineer W. Borlace, did not listen to him. According to Roderick, “The Borlace Shaft had only been sunk to 90 feet when water from the old workings and open cut began pouring in and they were unable to sink it any further.” Borlace confessed to the former mine manager that the shaft, now useless, had cost $90,000 to excavate.

Activity in the area continued intermittently for years, but little more than exploration was done and not much gold was produced. A total of 21,000 ounces of gold have been produced in Fifteen Mile Stream. Approximately 16,000 of them were produced during the 1890s, mostly by the MacGregors.

One noteworthy later event, if only because Roderick was directly involved, was in 1927 when diamond drilling exploration was done by Sir Stopford Brunton, an Englishman who studied at McGill University in Montreal and worked at the Geological Survey of Canada until World War One broke out.

Roderick late wrote, “In the 1920’s after returning from World War 1, my commanding officer Sir Stopford Brunton, a geologist, and I contacted a number of British and Canadian Mining Companies, in every case their geologists and engineers were interested…. I finally interested Dr. James and Dr. Gill, mining consultants, in the property. Dr. James was associated with Ventures. Dr. Gill was the head of post-graduate mining studies at McGill University and a consultant of Sullivan Consolidated Mines. They formed a syndicate of five prominent mining men, I was a miner member of the syndicate.”

Unfortunately, Dr. James subsequently became interested in the Goldenville gold district and the syndicate fell apart (https://notyourgrandfathersmining.ca/goldenville).

In 1988, a bulk sample was extracted by NovaGold as part of the decades of intermittent exploration work in the area. The company’s reclamation of the brief mining operation is an excellent example of environmental management of an exploration site. The “before and after” pictures below show the beautiful wetland the company created after completing the bulk sample.

Today, St. Barbara, which extracted at the Moose River/Touquoy gold mine from 1917-23, is advancing the 15-Mile Gold Project at the site of the historical mine. The modern mine is projected to extract for 11 years and to have over ten years of reclamation activities.

Over 400 jobs would be created during the mine’s construction and 200 people would be employed at the mine during operations, with an average salary of $82,000 per year plus benefits and bonus programs.

The modern mine will generate hundreds of millions of dollars in economic spinoffs. There will be $925 million in total spending over the life of the mine.

The 15-Mile Project has been designed to reduce impact with the environment, waterways and wildlife, and to remediate historical mine tailings. An estimated 60 hectares of soils will be cleaned up, similar to how the company cleaned up historical tailings at the Moose River mine.

See the Moose River mine’s story at https://notyourgrandfathersmining.ca/moose-rivers-touquoy-mine