Country Harbour Mines

The Country Harbour Gold District had only modest success. It was the area’s “fault.”

Gold was discovered in Country Harbour (aka Country Harbour Mines), Guysborough County, by J. Fraser in September 1861. Little work was done for many years, but Fraser’s find would eventually lead to mining in three distinct areas of Country Harbour.

The Country Harbour Gold District was the most active of the three areas. During the 1890s, the Antigonish Gold Mining Company, under the management of J. C. McDonald, worked the Copeland mine until 1895, and the Country Harbour Gold Mining Company worked intermittently on the gold-bearing quartz vein called the Prince lead. The properties of these two companies were taken over by A. C. Blair but the mines were closed by the time of a 1902 visit by a government inspector. From the start of the 1900s on, activity was intermittent.

The Narrows Gold Mine was a small-scale mine, with a couple shafts and an open cut, along the east bank of Country Harbour River. It was an insignificant producer.

The Widow Point Gold Mine was along the south flank of the Country Harbour River valley. The year that gold was discovered there is not known, and the only mining took place between 1944 and 1949 from two shafts and a tunnel.

Although these three sites are considered separate gold deposits, in all likelihood they were originally part of a single deposit that was subsequently severed and shifted by geological forces.

A fault split the Country Harbour deposit sometime during the Carboniferous Period (300-360 million years ago). In geology, a fault is a fracture, or zone of fractures, between two blocks of rock. Faults are caused by geological forces like tectonic plate movement, and they allow the blocks of rock to move relative to each other. Faults are a challenge in mining because they can cause deposits to be split, moving part of a deposit to a different, often hard-to-find, location.

In the case of Country Harbour’s gold deposit, the fault split the deposit into three parts, moving the veins worked in the Narrows and Widow Point mines to the locations shown on the map below.

The Country Harbour River valley marks where the Country Harbour fault is. The collision of tectonic plates softens and breaks rock. This often results in valleys and low-lying areas that become rivers as the underlying bedrock, weakened by plate collisions, erodes. Other Nova Scotia rivers also follow faults caused by tectonic plate movement (i.e. the Lahave, Sheet Harbour, Roseway St. Mary’s, Tangier, Mersey, New Harbour, etc.). Many Nova Scotia rivers and lakes along the Atlantic shore also trend northwest-southeast for the same reason.

Country Harbour has been explored intermittently in recent decades. In the mining industry, we say new mines are often found next to old mines because historical sites worked with basic tools and little science can today be mined profitably and environmentally-responsibly with modern science and engineering. That is why almost all the activity in Nova Scotia’s gold sector is at historical gold mines that still have the potential to return to production and create jobs.

Mining in Country Harbour in the 1930s.