French Road

A small historical copper mine in French Road, Cape Breton, highlights Nova Scotia’s potential to produce a metal that is critical to climate goals.

In 1876, Hugh Fletcher, a geologist with the Geological Survey of Canada, discovered float (pieces of copper-bearing ore eroded from bedrock deposits) "At Angus MacDonald’s, on the Caribou Marsh Road, about two miles from Gabarus Bay….”

That year a 40-foot mine shaft was dug, and a drift (tunnel) was driven eastward from the shaft’s bottom. However, work then ceased for unknown reasons.

The area was not worked again until around 1931, according to the Nova Scotia Department of Mines’ 1943 annual report, but little was documented about the activity at that time. The report described the deposit as being “on the farm of Joseph MacDonald near MacDonald's lake….There is a vertical shaft measuring 4 feet by 8 feet, which is reported to be 40 feet deep, with a drift which explored the ground to the eastward at the bottom of the shaft.”

The Department of Mines found about 2000 tons of excavated rock found at surface in 1943. A test of this rock found that it contained 2.1% copper. To put that in perspective, the average ore grade for copper was about 2% in 1900. Today, miners use ore grades of 0.5% copper because ore grades around the world are generally decreasing.

When Department of Mines geologists visited the area in 1996, the shaft was filled with water to within 10 metres of the surface. They noted that a tunnel “appears to have been driven in a southerly direction at the 10 m level.”

The French Road deposit has been explored intermittently in the decades since the mid 1900s. We know today that it also has potential for the critical minerals cobalt and bismuth.

French Road was not the only copper deposit found in the area. For example, a copper mine operated at nearby Eagle Head, on Gabarus Bay. Today, that site is part of the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Park, an example of the fact that some of Nova Scotia’s most beautiful parks and protected areas contain former mines and quarries. See the Eagle Head copper mine’s story at https://notyourgrandfathersmining.ca/eagle-head

Nova Scotia had many copper mines historically and has potential to produce it again today. Copper is arguably the most important metal for clean energy because it is used in most electrical wiring. An electric vehicle can use as much as 176 pounds of copper, four times the amount used in a typical combustion engine vehicle. Onshore wind turbines require about 11 tons of critical minerals per megawatt of capacity, including three tons of copper. Solar panels contain 5.5 tons of copper per megawatt.

The French Road mine is just north of centre on this 1879 Geological Survey of Canada map. Today, the small lake just south of it is called Copper Lake.