Roman Valley

Roman Valley, Guysborough County, had several small historical iron mines but none of them worked out.

Nova Scotia has two halves geologically: The northern half came from Europe and the southern half from Africa. The Cobequid-Chedabucto Fault System (CCFS) is where they collided 400 million years ago.

People sometimes think of it as a single fault that cuts the province in half. In fact, it's a fault zone or system, not a single fault. (It’s like a broken phone screen that has a spider web of cracks, not just one.)

The heat and pressure caused by two tectonic plates colliding and rubbing against each other for millions of years caused earthquakes and melted rocks in Earth’s crust. It also caused the concentration of many minerals. There are hundreds of known mineral deposits in the area, many of which were mined.

For example, there are many iron deposits along the CCFS that were mined in the 1800s and 1900s. The colliding tectonic plates opened up a series of faults (fractures) between the plates. The faults tapped into Earth’s mantle and allowed huge amounts of iron-rich solutions to escape and rise toward Earth’s surface. As these fluids got closer to the surface – away from the heat of Earth’s centre and the heat of the tectonic collision - they cooled and solidified, forming iron deposits.

Roman Valley saw considerable exploration for iron in the early 1900s, but the work was ultimately unsuccessful. In fact, while several of the explored areas are referred to as mines, they were mostly little more than exploration sites at which modest amounts of extraction took place. Today, we would refer to them as prospects.

DUNPHY PROSPECT - The Dominion Iron and Steel Company did a thorough examination of the Dunphy Prospect (aka the Roman Valley Iron Mine) in 1902. A 7.5 metre adit (tunnel) was driven and over 25 tons of ore was extracted. The ore was shipped to the iron furnaces at Londonderry, Colchester County. The ore was found to contain an average of 69% iron.

DOYLE MINE - A nine-metre shaft was sunk at the Doyle Iron Mine sometime prior to 1912 by New Glasgow interests. In 1912, the Dominion Iron and Steel Company extensively prospected the area but concluded that there were merely pockets of iron, not a large, significant deposit, and quit the site. The Roman Valley Iron Company was was formed in 1923 to investigate specular hematite deposits in the Roman Valley area, but no records of its results are known. (Hematite is the most common rock from which iron is extracted and specularite is a type of hematite.) The M. J. Boylen Engineering Company carried out an examination in the area in 1954.

When the Doyle mine was examined by Nova Scotia Department of Mines staff in 1994, the only signs of the historical activity were a partly caved hole, which was believed to be the shaft, and a pile of waste rock.

ATKINS IRON MINE - Two shafts were sunk at the Atkins Iron Mine. Number 1 shaft was sunk to a depth of eight metres and Number 2 shaft, 82 metres north of the first, was four metres deep. A third shaft was sunk to bedrock, but the analyses obtained at the time did not support further work. Three shallow pits were also dug, one to the north and two to the south of the shafts, but they either showed no mineralization or were unable to reach bedrock because of water problems.

CHISHOLM PROSPECT - The Chisholm prospect was about 500 feet downstream (east) from the mouth of Mink Brook. A 40-foot vertical shaft was sunk on a 6-foot vein of specularite, on the north bank of the Guysborough River, around 1920. A 40-foot level (tunnel) was driven south, under the river, from the bottom of the shaft.

Steel is mainly iron and carbon, and the carbon is derived from metallurgical (aka steelmaking) coal, which contains more carbon, less ash and less moisture than thermal 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. That is why the Dominion Iron and Steel Company, which operated the Sydney steel plant, did so much exploration for iron in Roman Valley and many other parts of Nova Scotia.

Many Nova Scotia coal mines have produced metallurgical coal and Cape Breton’s Donkin deposit is metallurgical-grade.

Steel is all around us, in electronics, cars, appliances, buildings and infrastructure, wind turbines, solar panels, and countless other things. The world produces about 1.8 billion tonnes of steel each year.