New Glasgow’s Linacy Mine

We love examples of former mines and quarries that operated in what are now the middle of towns!

There used to be several small mines around the intersection of Merigomish Road and Lorne Street in New Glasgow.

The first mining activity in the area took place in 1866 when a Mr. Kirby drove a slope (decline tunnel) on an outcrop of a coal seam reported to be 1.2 metres thick.

Several other operators worked sporadically in the area over the years, including Grant and Muir, Muir and Son, MacNeil and Sutherland.

The last mine in the area, the Linacy Mine, was run by Edward Hughes. Hughes, pictured below, was born in Scotland and was a veteran of WWI. He lived most of his life in Thorburn, Pictou County, and had been an underground official with the Greenwood Coal Company.

He formed the Linacy Coal Company in 1961. His son Harry managed the mine, which opened in September that year with a bank head that chuted coal to trucks. Slopes were driven down and pumps, boring and cutting machinery were installed.

The Linacy Mine encountered a fault. 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 the deposit to a different, often hard-to-find, location. This caused the Linacy Mine to shut down in 1962.

The Linacy area, just east of New Glasgow, was named for an early settler, Edward Linacy.