Dominion No. 1B in 1931
A reporter toured Glace Bay’s Dominion No. 1B coal mine in 1931 and the article he wrote offered interesting details about what working in the mine was like in that era.
The reporter, identified only as “A Staff Representative” in the Halifax Mail, toured the mine in August 1931 for a series of articles the newspaper published about the state of the province’s coal mines during the Great Depression. At that time, coal mining was “An industry on which one-quarter of the people of Nova Scotia are directly or indirectly dependent for their livelihood….”
The article described the No. 1B mine as “the largest and the newest” coal mine in Cape Breton, but acknowledged that it was “New, yet not new, for it is really the transmigration of the ‘soul’ of old Dominion No. 1 into the new No. 1B.”
This was a reference to the fact that the Dominion No. 1B was opened to recover coal abandoned in 1903 by what came to be called the Dominion No. 1A mine, when a fire made it necessary to flood the 1A’s undersea tunnels with seawater. The 1A reopened about 15 months later but only mined underground, no longer under the sea, until it closed in 1927. No. 1B was established in 1924 to mine the undersea area of the Phalen coal seam that 1-A had abandoned. The No. 1B eventually closed in 1955.
Like many other Cape Breton coal mines in 1931, the No. 1B was only producing part time due to the poor state of the economy. The whistle would blow the night before to let miners know if they had work the next day. The article said, “The whistle is a sound that makes the miner’s heart rejoice for today the curse of work has not descended to the sons of Adam but rather the curse of no work has been laid upon them.”
The whistle had blown the night before, so the mine was active when the reporter toured it.
Describing the start of his tour, the reporter wrote that the mine’s cage (elevator) “immediately shot down – down seven hundred feet into the bowels of the earth, and with a slight thud presently touched the bottom…At first sight the mine reminded me a New York subway, with its electric lights, rows of car tracks and concrete walls on either side. There, however, the resemblance ended.”
The reporter and his guides did a “considerable walk in the darkness, for the electric lights extended only a short distance, then a thrilling ride in a ‘tub’ from which coal had just been emptied and we were miles out under the ocean. It was marvellous to think of being hundreds of feet in the depths of earth and yet more marvellous to know that we were under the sea with eighty feet of ocean rolling and tossing above us.”
Despite his excitement, the reporter admitted to “A disturbing thought of being entrapped…when we went through the explosion doors, which they told us were destined to shut off the area should fire occur.”
When they arrived at the mine’s underground stable, where the pit ponies were kept, most of the horses were out working but two were there. One of the miners that took care of the horses, referring to one of them, told the reporter, “Be careful as you pass. She’s just come down two days ago and is nervous in the mine. We have 110 horses all told here…The feed is kept in here. Water is piped from above. We have a cat here also. We need her on account of the rats.”
One of the miners described the mine’s “room and pillar” mining system, in which rooms of coal were extracted while pillars of rock and coal were left in place to support the mine’s roof (ceiling): “This mine is laid off like a checker-board in square rooms of sixteen feet each. There are two hundred rooms being worked just now, with two men in each. There are cross-cuts [tunnels] every forty-five feet, which leaves a block of coal 45 feet long by 50 feet thick and it is called a ‘pillar.’ Only forty-two percent of the coal is taken out of the mine, the rest is left for support.”
The miner went on: “The cross-cuts afford means of the circulation of air for ventilation [which] is very vital in the mine. We get our air from above. Perhaps you noticed the fan not far from the shaft. It sends down 125,000 cubic feet of air each minute for us to breathe.”
Water seeps into most mines from the surrounding rock, so pumping it out is essential: “The two pumps are in the room near-by. They pump 1250 gallons of water each, or 700 feet of water a minute, up to the surface,” explained a miner. “For every ton of coal we have to pump out four tons of water.”
The reporter was then told, “Angus is going to fire a shot.” Nine holes had been drilled into the coal face and TNT inserted. Angus said, “The powder will be added later [to trigger the blast]…We stand 100 feet off when the shot is fired.”
The reporter described the small blast as a “dull boom accompanied by a cascade of shining coal. How fast the miners worked! The pick was no sooner in the air than it fell to the ground and the coal went flying from the shovel into the cart.”
Angus, who had worked in the mine for several decades, said, “I like the mine because I’ve always worked in it. This place is not like the city, where there is so much to choose from. When there’s work, we can always work in the mine. We are not like fishermen, dependent on the weather. And the mine is neither too hot in summer nor too cold in winter. It’s the same temperature all the year.”
Commenting on the safety concerns about coal mines, Angus said, “In 1929 we had 21 fatal accidents in Nova Scotia mines and 63 fatal accidents on the highways, which goes to show the highways are more fatal than the coal mines.”
As the tour wound down, the reporter and his guides rode another tub – a small rail car – back to the cage. The tubs in front of them were loaded with coal heading toward surface. One of the miners showed the reporters fossils of ferns, blades of grass, tree branches and a tree trunk in the coal. Coal deposits often contain fossils because of how coal forms.
Nova Scotia’s coal deposits started forming 300 million years ago when Nova Scotia had a tropical climate – tectonic plate movement had us in the middle of supercontinent Pangea, down around the equator.
Swamps contained dense vegetation that died, drifted to the bottom of the swamps and gradually formed peat—a soggy, sponge-like material. As the peat accumulated, the weight of the top layers compacted the lower layers by squeezing out water.
The peat was buried over time by sediments and ocean water. Deeper burial increased pressure and heat on the vegetation, causing chemical and physical changes, and pushing out oxygen. Over thousands of years, this turned the peat into the coal.
The process also often created fossils, particularly of the plants that died in the swamps.
With the tour over, the article concluded, “Up from the darkness below and out into the brilliant sunshine, and we were on top of God’s earth once more. Since I came here, I have heard much of the bravery, self-sacrifice and kindliness of the miners from those who live among them.”
The Dominion No. 1B mine.
The Dominion No. 1B mine.
The Dominion No. 1B mine.
