Not Your Grandfathers Mining Industry, Nova Scotia, Canada

Fletcher and Faribault

In the long history of government geologists who made important contributions to our understanding of Nova Scotia’s geology, two particularly stand out: Hugh Fletcher and Eugène Rodolphe Faribault.

Nova Scotians owe a great deal to federal and provincial government geologists who help figure out the province’s geology. This knowledge is used by the mining industry to help find extract the mineral deposits that society needs. It is also used to help keep Nova Scotians safe from geohazards like radon gas, sinkholes, minerals in drinking water and natural geological processes like coastal erosion. Understanding geology is essential to understanding the world around us.

Hugh Fletcher was born in London, England, on December 9, 1848. His father, a mining engineer, brought his family to Canada in 1860 and worked as manager of the gold mine at Tangier.

Later, Fletcher attended the University of Toronto and graduated near the top of his class in 1872 with a degree in natural sciences. He then worked as a geological assistant to Charles Robb of the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC), studying the Cape Breton coal fields. Fletcher replaced Robb in 1875 and assumed responsibility for the geological mapping of Nova Scotia.

In those early years of Confederation, Nova Scotia was considered a mineral-rich province, and its coal resources were of great strategic importance to the young country. Fletcher worked his entire career in Nova Scotia and would be a mentor to Faribault, who joined the GSC in 1884. Together they produced the first series of geological maps of the province with Fletcher concentrating on Cape Breton and northern Nova Scotia, with its coal resources, and Faribault on the eastern and southern mainland, where most of the gold districts are found.

Fletcher was held in very high esteem by the province’s mining industry and his work often directly assisted mining operations. Some of his other achievements included directing the Town of Truro to a potable water supply and advising the province on mineral policy.

During the early 1900s, when there was a prolonged and bitter dispute between Fletcher and GSC paleontologist H. M. Ami about the age of some Nova Scotian rock units, the Canadian Mining Review demanded that the issue be settled because it was holding up publication of ten of Fletcher’s maps, which were considered so important to the mining industry. Fletcher’s maps were published, but Ami was later proven to be correct about the age of the rocks in question.

While working on the geological relationship between the Springhill and Joggins coal districts in 1909, Fletcher caught pneumonia and died on September 23 in Lower Cove where his field camp was located. The Canadian Mining Journal wrote at the time that "he died, as he would have chosen, in harness, and amid the hills of his well-loved Nova Scotia.”

William Fletcher, Hugh’s younger brother, worked with Hugh’s mapping party in 1881. William drowned while he was trying to ford the Margaree River to visit his sweetheart, Christie McLeod, who lived in Big Intervale. Hugh met Christie at his brother’s funeral and the two married about a year later. They had two children, William (named after Hugh’s late brother) and Christine. Christie died of tuberculosis in 1892 and was buried in Margaree Centre.

When Hugh Fletcher passed away in 1909, he was buried next to William and Christie in Margaree Centre. Their three graves can still be found side-by-side in the local cemetery.

Eugène Rodolphe Faribault was born in L’Assomption, Quebec, on November 6, 1860. He was likely the longest-serving geologist in the GSC’s history, with a 51-year career from 1882-1932. His life's work was the systematic geological mapping of Nova Scotia, particularly its gold fields starting in 1885. He began near Guysborough and, at the time of his retirement, was working south of Annapolis. The Westfield gold deposit, in Queens County, is probably the last gold property he mapped before his retirement.

Faribault was the first to realize that the productive veins of gold in Nova Scotia occurred like saddles along the crests of small anticlines, and he discovered many, mostly small, orebodies. His discoveries are still fundamental to our understanding of Nova Scotia’s gold deposits.

Faribault studied new mining methods, the application of electric power in mines before it was widely used, and new extraction methods. He spread the word about innovations and best practices among the province’s mine operators.

A book about the history of the GSC, “Reading the Rocks,” said, “Faribault spent each field season mapping the complicated structures area by area and in great detail. While other geologists spent difficult months in swampy, insect-infested terrain, Faribault usually went to the field in the company of his family and bicycled to the site of his work from their summer cottage.”

Faribault and his wife, Eva, had seven children and he was described as a “devoted family man” in an obituary published by the Royal Society of Canada after his death on July 24, 1953.

The obituary also called him the “Grand Old Man of Nova Scotian Geology.”

The series of maps produced by Fletcher and Faribault was the Geological Survey of Canada's most ambitious project to that point. They published 70 map sheets with a scale of 1 inch = 1 mile, as well as many cross sections and detailed plans on scales as large as 1 inch = 500 feet. These excellent geological maps represent, in most cases, the first accurate delineation of many of the province's coalfields and continue to stand today as examples of excellence in field geology. The maps are amazingly detailed and accurate considering the time at which they were created, the equipment available and the lack of subsurface information.

After Hugh Fletcher gave a talk to a Nova Scotian mining audience in 1903, one attendee said, “about all Nova Scotia got from the confederation was the work of the geological survey.”

Faribault’s 1908 map of Halifax is below to show the complexity of the maps created by geologists long before the existence of the sophisticated technologies we use today. It can be viewed in more detail at https://ostr-backend-prod.azurewebsites.net/server/api/core/bitstreams/7...

Our thanks to retired Nova Scotia government geologist George O’Reilly for his assistance with this post and countless others. He is an example of the government geologists to whom we owe a huge debt.