Not Your Grandfathers Mining Industry, Nova Scotia, Canada

Upper Glencoe

John Hart missed out on making a fortune during historical gold rushes out West, and again back home in Nova Scotia after he discovered an iron mine in Upper Glencoe. However, his life was remarkable. Here is his story.

John Smith Hart (1874-1964) became a well-known and well-liked merchant in Port Hood, running a general store founded by his father. However, he had a range of interests, and as a young man, he headed west during the Klondike gold rush.

According to Cape Breton Magazine, Hart and his cousin, Simon Fraser, each borrowed $500 from an uncle and travelled to the Klondike to prospect for gold. However, it did not go well, and Hart later sold all his belongings to a man as he was getting off the boat from Seattle. Broke and disillusioned, Hart then took the next boat to San Francisco on his way back home to Nova Scotia.

Simon Fraser, however, carried on and eventually struck it rich in Utah. One of Hart’s sons, Lee, told Cape Breton Magazine, “If my father had’ve stayed, he’d been in it. But he had to come back. And the old man who grubstaked them – he died a millionaire [thanks to Simon’s find].”

According to memoryns.ca, after returning from the Klondike, Hart worked for his father and raised silver foxes. He also became an inventor and patented a number of inventions, including a device for preserving fishermen's bait, diving suits, automatic railroad crossing signals, a windmill for sawing wood, and a plane that would eject the passenger if it was hit by a bomb.

He also invented a new braking system for mine rakes (trains that carry miners in and out of mines). Perly W. Smith, interviewed by Cape Breton Magazine, said, “He had a track made and a carriage on it and controls so that if anything was to happen it would come to a stop. He used to demonstrate it before the public out there. Take it up to the top of the hill and he’d get onto it. He had a large hat on his head and a big red necktie flying in the wind – and down he’d come at 20-30 mile an hour – and throw a switch and the whole thing would come to a standstill.”

The Dominion Coal Company declined to purchase Hart’s braking system in 1955, saying its rakes already had special safety brakes.

Smith and others described Hart as generous, honest, friendly, funny, reliable and, said Smith, “he always had a bright idea, looking for a bright future.”

Despite his wide range of other interests, Hart continued to prospect for mineral deposits. On the farms of Hugh and John McEachern in Upper Glencoe, Inverness County, he found a deposit of magnetite, an ore of iron (meaning iron is often derived from magnetite) in an eight-foot-deep trench and a nearby pit.

Another of Hart’s sons, Lew, said, “He had an iron mine in Glencoe and he made a few dollars out of that all right – but he was selling his ore to the Sydney Steel Plant. Well, they wanted to buy the mine. They offered him 50,000 for it. He figured if it’s worth 50 it’s worth a lot more. He wouldn’t sell. So they cut off his contract and he had to close the mine.”

Lew also said, “He always cursed the mining laws in Nova Scotia. They were such that he couldn’t do anything. The Depression was on a lot of the time and money was scarce. He’d be all enthused once you’d dig a hole and strike a ledge of rock that looked good – and he had good assay reports on a lot of the stuff – but it was hard to get companies involved.”

In 1912, Hart optioned his Upper Glencoe mine to Hadley B. Tremaine of Windsor, Hants County, who subsequently assigned his rights to the Dominion Iron and Steel Company, the operator of the Sydney steel plant.

Hart had refused to sell his mine to the company, turning down the equivalent of about $1.5 million in today’s dollars, but the company ended up with the mine anyway.

Steel is mainly iron and carbon, and the carbon is derived from metallurgical (steelmaking) coal. Nova Scotia got into steel production in the 1800s because it has vast coal deposits and the hope was that local iron would provide the second of the two key ingredients. Both the Dominion Iron and Steel Company and the Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company explored a number of sites in Nova Scotia for their iron potential in the early 1900s.

On June 1, 1912, Dominion started work at the Upper Glencoe site with a team of eight men, which grew to 16 in August. The company spent about $45,000 by October 1913 prospecting the site. A shaft was dug and drifting (tunnelling) was done from the shaft’s bottom. Several pits were also dug.

Dominion sought to define the size of the ore body, but results were inconclusive because the magnetite was in a series of lenses – separate small deposits, not one large one – which would make extraction more difficult and expensive.

Dominion also found that the percentage of sulphur, an impurity from a steel company’s perspective, in the magnetite increased as they dug deeper. Weathering of the magnetite near surface appeared to have reduced the sulphur content, making the deposit appear higher quality than it proved to be at depth.

The property had several additional challenges. The shaft encountered high water inflow of 500 gallons per minute, which pumps struggled to manage. It was about 12 miles from River Dennys and 14 miles from Orangedale, not close to shipping by rail. It also had considerable overburden (dirt) that had to be dug through to access the deposit, which added to the potential cost of extraction.

Dominion abandoned the property, but not before its exploration work attracted considerable attention and caused various parties to explore surrounding areas for iron. However, no additional discoveries resulted.

The Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company worked the site from 1914-17. The company dug a new shaft and two pits and extracted 90 tons of ore that were shipped to New Glasgow for treatment. However, the high sulphur content made the ore unsatisfactory.

The Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company did some exploration diamond drilling in 1921. One of the drillholes reportedly intersected a nine-foot lens of magnetite but the company stopped work.

Two decades later, in December 1940, John Hart was back at the property. He and John D. McMillan of Hawthorne staked the area. The Dominion Steel and Coal Company entered into an agreement with them, committing to explore the property and in exchange, Hart and McMillan would get a royalty if a mine were opened.

Dominion was again interested in the site because the company thought its magnetite might be valuable as a source of open hearth iron ore. Open hearth steelmaking was a slower process that made it easier to control the amount of carbon in the steel. It was a major method of steel production through much of the 1900s but has been phased out in recent decades.

Dominion drilled five diamond drillholes in 1942 but found no ore of commercial value, and the company again quit the site on June 8 that year.

On June 26, Geological Survey of Canada staff examined the workings after Hart and McMillan had men clean out the original trench and dewater the Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company’s shaft.

At the time of the Geological Survey of Canada’s visit, the property contained a new cabin in which the 1942 drill cores were stored. Other buildings, dating from the 1912-14 period, were in ruins and an upright, rust-coated boiler was still in place.

The site has been explored intermittently in the decades since, and it is thought that it may be part of a larger iron-oxide-copper-gold (IOCG) zone, and may therefore warrant additional exploration in the modern era.