Not Your Grandfathers Mining Industry, Nova Scotia, Canada

Bob Matheson

Like so many others, Bob Matheson worked in Nova Scotia’s mines, raised a family and helped build our province. Here is his story.

Robert David Matheson, known as Bob, was born in Cow Bay (now called Port Morien), Cape Breton, on April 21, 1876, to Ellen Jane Grant Matheson of North West Arm, Sydney, and Daniel Matheson of Low Point.

Bob followed in his father’s footsteps and began working in Cow Bay’s Gowrie coal mine at the age of 12. He likely started as a trapper boy, meaning he opened and closed the doors that helped control air flow within the mine as part of its ventilation system. This was often the first job done by children who worked in coal mines.

The Dominion Coal Company bought the Gowrie mine in 1893, part of Henry Melville Whitney’s effort to consolidate under his ownership practically all the coal mines operating in the Sydney coalfield east of Sydney Harbour. Bob worked there until Dominion closed the Gowrie in 1897.

Whitney also built the Sydney steel mill and used Cape Breton coal as a key ingredient in his steel business. Steel is mainly iron and carbon, and the carbon is derived from metallurgical coal, which contains more carbon, less ash and less moisture than thermal coal, the kind burned to produce electricity. Nova Scotia’s long history of steelmaking was based on the province’s extensive metallurgical coal deposits and iron from Nova Scotia and, later, Newfoundland.

In 1899, Bob was working underground again in a new sub-sea mine started by the Gowrie & Blockhouse Mining Company. The mine’s main shafts were adjacent to the site of the present-day Port Morien Legion.

Bob’s family still has a piece of paper, which he kept in a box, that lists the pay rates in the Gowrie & Blockhouse mine in 1904: cutting and shooting paid 22.5 cents per ton, loading paid 15 cents per ton, “green” (inexperienced) helpers in rooms were paid $1.40 per day, and experienced helpers were paid $1.50.

The paper, below, says rooms were 16 feet wide, a reference to the practice of mining coal with the room and pillar method, in which "rooms" of ore were dug out while "pillars" of untouched material were left to support the mine’s roof (ceiling).

Sometime after 1904, Bob was hired as a mine official at the newly-opened Dominion No. 6 Mine in present-day Donkin. As a more senior employee, he was entitled to rent one side of the new double miner's company houses in the village. In 1905, only six double houses had been completed but 45 more and 20 single houses were under construction.

In 1938, the Dominion Coal Company sold these houses to the miners living in them. Bob bought both sides of his house for $300 and lived in it the rest of his life.

There was more to life than just work and Bob played hockey on the Port Morien hockey team in 1906. He was also one of the founding members of the newly-formed Independent Order of Odd Fellows Martin Lodge in the village in 1908.

In 1920, Bob married Sadie MacRae from the Points West Bay, and they went on to have eight children.

Bob is seen in the 1925 photo below, an iconic Cape Breton mining picture from that era. He is standing top left next to a rake (train) full of miners ready to descend into the No. 6 mine. In his right hand is a Locked Flame safety lamp used by the mine examiners and overmen to test for methane gas.

1925 would prove to be a turning point for the No. 6. After a miners strike that year, Dominion decided “to close the mine permanently because of the difficulty of marketing this coal in its main outlets, the St. Lawrence market and the C.N.R. [Canadian National Railway] who refused to purchase No. 6 coal because of the high sulphur content,” according to Louis Frost, a mining engineer with Dominion. “At this period the west side workings had nearly reached depletion, and the effective life of the colliery lay on the east side, where the sulphur content was 6 percent. As a result, notice of abandonment was given the Deputy Minister on July 28th, 1926, but the Mines Department compelled the company to keep the mine opened and pumped until the mine was finally closed on October 27th, 1933.”

Bob was one of a small group of experienced miners kept on to manage the mine in its final years, keeping it pumped out and ventilated, even though extraction had largely ceased in 1925.

In 1934, Bob and James Napier were examining a fault in the mine when a rock fell from the roof (ceiling), killing Napier and injuring Bob. Dominion immediately halted all remediation work, and the mine was sealed. (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.)

Bob then went to the Dominion No. 24 mine in Glace Bay where he worked until his retirement in the late 1940s.

Bob Matheson passed away in 1967 at the age of 91.

Bob's oldest son, Robert Jr., served in WWII as a pilot, and became a lawyer after the war. In 1977, he became president of Devco (the Cape Breton Development Corporation), whose mandate was to manage the eventual shutdown of Cape Breton’s coal mines while diversifying the island’s economy.

In one generation, the Matheson family went from Bob working as a child miner to his son Robert working as president of the company that held the rights to much of Cape Breton’s coal.

Our thanks to Robert MacDougall Jr., Bob Matheson’s grandson, for sharing his family’s story with us. Robert spent 28 years working in mines after leaving the military.