Chapter I: Dawn of Mining Days  (continued)

With the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the era of prosperity ended. The West mine shut down in 1902 and by 1907 the East mine's visible ore reserves were nearly gone. The mines had been high-graded, copper prices were sagging and the end was in sight. To add to Tilt Cove's woes a freak snowslide on 11 March 1912 killed Francis W. Williams, the most popular manager in the town's history.

Bennett's trustees, meanwhile, had been looking on in alarm at the mines' demise. Afraid of losing their 800 debentures, they approached Tilt Cove Copper Company directors during the lull in operations following William's death, and requested the £80,000. The Cape Copper Company announced shortly afterward that troubles with its African mines obliged it to cancel its contract with the Tilt Cove Copper Company in September 1913. Faced with these converging dilemmas, the Tilt Cove Copper Company took the obvious recourse: it went into liquidation and in March 1914 returned the Tilt Cove mining lease to Bennett's trustees.

It is a fact of the mining industry that what at one time may be an economically unviable metal ore deposit may later become viable, should the metal's price increase sufficiently. At a shareholders meeting of the Cape Copper Company in 1913, the chairman announced that the Tilt Cove mines approached exhaustion;⁽³⁵⁾ and yet within two years of the company's withdrawal from Tilt Cover two Newfoundlanders took over the mining operation and made $150,000. They could do so because the outbreak of World War I caused copper prices to more than double between 1914 and 1916.

The two gentlemen in question were Robert G. Rendell, administrator for the state of Charles Bennett, and James M. Jackman, a Tilt Cove merchant who became acting mine manager after William's death. Rendell and Jackman had worked together previously on a number of mining ventures. When the Tilt Cover mines became available they requested and obtained the right to operate the property.

Rendell and Jackman organized the Tilt Cover Mining Company and quickly made the $150,000 by taking advantage of inflated wartime copper prices. In the end, however, the war proved their downfall, as freight rates escalated so much that the men could not afford to ship the ore to market. They tried to overcome the problem by treating the ore on site with an ore concentrating plant worth $100,000, but two days after the plant's installation in 1916 it broke down. Having no inclination to struggle further with the machine or the mine, Rendell and Jackman sold the concentrator to a company in Bay Roberts and returned the mine to its trustees.

So ended the first active era of the Tilt Cover mines. One could extol the economic virtues to Newfoundland of the roughly 61,000 tons of metallic copper, 416 tons of nickel ore, 50,000 ounces of gold and 50,000 ounces of silver produced by the mines during those 53 years, but historically that would be secondary. The Tilt Cover mines' real significance lay in that their inception sparked the Notre Dame Bay copper boom - the very backbone of Newfoundland's mining history.