Loops and the Cornish Miner
The tragic fates of an Englishman called Loops and a Cornish miner became linked because of a slate quarry in Rawdon in the 1800s.
In spring 1818, the Dickey family, which lived on the Cobequid Road in Lower Stewiacke, Colchester County, were having supper when someone knocked at the door. According to the February 10, 1899, edition of the Halifax Herald, “a stranger entered, he was a well dressed young man who asked for supper and a bed for the night. I am able to pay, he added.”
The stranger’s name was George Silk-Loops. He stayed the night, ate breakfast the next morning, and continued to Truro.
Two days later he returned to the Dickey home and asked if he could stay a couple weeks. The Herald reported that he “told Mr. Dickey that he was an Englishman from Sussex…that he had lived with a friend who had died lately, and left him a generous sum of money. The executor of his friend had suggested that he should go to Nova Scotia, and his money would be placed in the hands of a lawyer in Truro.”
He had gone to Truro and gotten his money, which he afterward used to buy three or four head of cattle and a farm “near the present railway station at Lower Stewiacke.”
Loops, as he became known in the community, also got into lending money to people in Stewiacke. He charged interest but was considered “a pleasant, sober fellow, well-liked by all acquainted with him,” according to the Herald.
One person who borrowed from Loops was a miner from Cornwall who was opening a slate quarry in Rawdon, Hants County, and who had a “great expectation of rapidly realizing a fortune.”
Loops and the Cornish miner, who is not named in the Herald article, became good friends. Loops often visited the miner and spent several days at a time at the slate quarry. He even moved to Rawdon, buying a large house close to the quarry. He rented part of the house to the miner and his family, and the miner’s wife cooked for all of them and helped take care of Loops and the house.
In fall 1825, Loops went missing.
A woman in the community said she had seen him about three weeks earlier, walking along the road that led to Kennetcook. Less than an hour later, she said, she had also seen the miner riding along the road, in the same direction, on Loops’ horse.
The miner explained “That three weeks ago he had asked Mr. Loops to lend him his horse as he wanted to see a man who lived some eight miles distant,” according to the Herald. The miner claimed Loops gave him permission to borrow the horse, and that Loops planned to stay two weeks in Kennetcook.
The miner said he expected to overtake Loops on the road since he was on horseback and left only about an hour after him, but that he never saw Loops.
When Loops did not return after two weeks, the miner wrote to the person Loops was going to visit in Kennetcook. However, the Kennetcook man wrote back that he had not seen Loops recently.
Search parties were organized and day after day, people in the community went looking for Loops, particularly along the section of road that did not have any houses on it. However, no trace of him was found.
Many believed the miner had killed Loops and there were rumours that he was going to be arrested. However, he continued to forcefully claim that he had nothing to do with his friend’s disappearance and no arrest took place.
Life in the community eventually returned to normal, and the mystery of Loops’ disappearance just became local lore.
A year later, the miner’s slate quarry failed, and he and his family left Rawdon.
In 1850, twenty-five years later, three men were in a field about one mile from the Kennetcook road. They turned over what the Herald called a “windfall,” referring to the word’s original meaning: a tree or part of a tree blown down by the wind. Under the windfall they found a skeleton. They examined it and also found parts of a watch and some coins (“seven fifteen pence pieces of silver of the reign of George the Third”).
According to the Herald, “As the oldest inhabitants had not heard of any man but Loops being lost, these bones must have belonged to him.”
We cannot be certain that the skeleton was Loops but it seems a reasonable assumption. We also cannot be sure that it was the miner who killed him, although the circumstantial evidence suggests he did. However, it is not clear why the miner would kill his friend when they appeared to have such a good relationship. Or why Loops would have chosen to walk to Kennetcook instead of riding his horse. Or why the killer, whether the miner or someone else, would have left coins in the murder victim’s pockets.
All we know for sure is that the miner also came to a sad end eventually: “He was a crazy man for years, a harmless lunatic, who unwatched, one day plunged into a river and was drowned,” wrote the Herald.
The location of the miner’s slate quarry is unknown, but there is a long history of slate quarrying in the area because the Rawdon Hills’ bedrock is slate. For example, the historical East Gore Slate Quarry likely started in the mid-1800s and operated into the early 1900s. Today there is a modern slate quarry directly across Slate Quarry Road from the historical quarry.
The area around the Rawdon Hills is mostly sandstone and limestone bedrock that was eroded by glaciers during ice ages, the last of which ended about 12,000 years ago. Sandstone and limestone are softer rocks that eroded more easily than the harder slate of the Rawdon Hills. As a result, the Rawdon Hills are the high point in the area and are surrounded by eroded, low-lying terrain.
The picture below shows the view from Courthouse Hill, part of the Rawdon Hills. Because of the area's geological history, five counties are visible from the site on a clear day: Hants, Kings, Colchester, Cumberland and Pictou.
Quartz veins, often containing gold, are found throughout the Rawdon Hills' slate bedrock and the area saw a great deal of historical gold mining.
The view from Courthouse Hill.
