Not Your Grandfathers Mining Industry, Nova Scotia, Canada

Farmer Miners

Many of Nova Scotia’s early gold miners were not actually miners - they were often farmers, fishermen and others with no expertise in mining. So, it’s not surprising they did not take care of the environment.

Here is just one small example, taken from an article by paleontologist O. C. Marsh in the American Journal of Science:

A couple weeks after visiting the Ovens in 1861, where a gold rush was starting, Marsh wrote this anecdote to illustrate the “utility of even a little scientific knowledge and the need of its more general diffusion. Some years since a farmer, living in the neighboring town of Chester, thought he had discovered a valuable copper mine on his land, and at great expense sunk a shaft about eighty feet in depth. Finding little copper to repay his labor, and having exhausted all his means, the work was finally abandoned. In his excavations he had cut through a large quartz vein richly stored with gold, which he had noticed, but supposed to be merely copper pyrites. The present owner works this copper mine for gold.”

In other words, the farmer found gold but didn’t even know it, and went broke trying to find copper in a gold deposit.

Marsh’s article does not say where the farmer’s mine was located, but Gold River, in the Chester area, was an historical gold district with numerous mines.

Modern mining is a sophisticated, science-based activity that takes excellent care of the environment. Modern mines can even help fix issues with historical sites by cleaning up tailings or stabilizing land that was left unusable by the pick and shovel mining of the distant past. For example, the modern Touquoy gold mine cleaned up historical tailings in Moose River and the Point Aconi coal mine reclamation project fixed subsidence issues caused by historical bootleg coal mining.

Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899) was a pioneering American paleontologist and professor at Yale College. He was born to a relatively poor family but became rich after inheriting from his childless uncle, George Peabody, a famous banker and philanthropist.

Starting around 1855, while still a student, Marsh visited Nova Scotia about a half dozen times to study the province’s fossils and minerals, and published several papers about them. He went on to become one of the United States’ best known paleontologists and his extensive fossil collection provided evidence in support of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

In 1862, Marsh claimed to have discovered at Joggins two vertebrae fossils from an animal he named Eosaurus Acadianus. However, it is believed the vertebrae were really from an ichthyosaurus, an already-known marine reptile.

Legend has it that Marsh actually bought the fossils from a fellow seafarer who convinced him that they had been found at Joggins. However, many paleontologists believe the fossils were purchased in Lyme Regis, England, from the famed fossil shop of Mary Anning.

Anning (1799-1847) was a self-taught palaeontologist whose fossil discoveries contributed to important advancements in paleontology and geology. Her hometown of Lyme Regis is in the Jurassic Coast UNESCO World Heritage Site, an area extremely rich in fossils.

Anning’s gender and lack of formal education caused her work to go largely unacknowledged in her day, even from fellow paleontologists who often bought fossils from her shop but did not credit her in their writings. The Geological Society of London refused to admit her as a member because she was a woman.

Anning sold fossils at her shop to make a meager living, but today, many of her fossils are displayed at Britan’s Natural History Museum and she is widely-known for her scientific contributions. She found the first complete plesiosaur skeleton and one of the first ichthyosaurs ever discovered, which lived between 250 and 90 million years ago.