Chapter II: Fever of the Copper Ore  (continued)

As the Betts Cove and Little Bay mines evolved, reached their primes and declined, numerous lesser copper mines also arose and fell in Notre Dame Bay. They lay in the Southwest Arm of Green Bay south of Betts Cove, in the adjacent Halls Bay, on Islands in the Bay of Exploits and farther east on Twillingate Island at Notre Dame Bay's eastern extremity. Although some mines were owned and worked by private individuals, the majority were leased and operated by one or both of the Betts Cove Mining Company and The Newfoundland Consolidated Copper Mining Company. Consequently, a number of the characters encountered in the Betts Cove and Little Bay accounts reappear in the stories of these smaller, but equally colourful, operations.

Southwest Art Mines

Looking at the rugged coastline of the Southwest Arm of Green Bay, it seems unimaginable that its south shore once harboured five copper mines. The oldest and most easterly of these, the Swatridge, belonged to a St. John's firm called the Southwest Arm Mining Company composed of six men, five of whom were or had been Liberal Members of the House of Assembly.

In 1876, an unusually warm autumn enabled miners employed by the company to drill two shafts on the Swatridge deposit and to raise some ore before the snow fell. The winter, however, reached far into 1877. One Sunday in May, mine manager Martin ventured onto a partly frozen pond while throwing sticks for his dog and fell through the ice. He drowned before help could arrive, bringing the Swatridge mining venture to an abrupt and unhappy end.

Two-and-one-half miles southwest of the Swatridge shafts sat a mine known variously as the Location, Pill's and Old English. If a person scrutinizes the area today he can still unearth remnants of the 800-foot double-track tramway that ran from one of the mine's two shafts down to a wharf on the Southwest Arm. He can also find fragments of wooden ducts that conducted pumped fresh air down shafts to the two dozen miners who worked under mine captain William Pill of England.

The Old English mine produced a small amount of ore in 1879 and 1880. Before the Consolidated Mining Company abandoned the mine in 1882, another 490 tons left the 'Southwest Arm mines', those being the old English and the adjacent Colchester mines.

In the early days of Newfoundland mining, people customarily referred to a small mine by the name of its presiding mine captain. Thus was the Colchester mine named after William Colchester, Francis Ellershausen's son-in-law, who managed the property for the Betts Cove Mining Company around 1878-79.

As soon as the Betts Cove Mining Company optioned the Colchester mine in 1878 from its owners, the Southwest Arm Mining Company, a farmer from the nearby village of Jackson's Arm, James Batstone, announced that he had discovered the orebody in the early 1870s. Judgment passed on the ensuing suit of equity against the Southwest Arm Mining Company allowed Batstone to buy a one-seventh share in the company for $220 in exchange for paying one-seventh of all prior and future company expenses. Batstone then turned the tables on politicians in general by immediately selling half of his share for $400 to Robert Bond, who later became a premier of Newfoundland.

By mid-1878 the Colchester mine thronged with miners busily erecting an inclined tramway and a road to the Southwest Arm, and sinking three shafts for the Betts Cove Mining Company. It also thronged with mosquitoes and blackflies that made the miners' lives miserable:

"No one could go about unless protected by a veil on hands and head, or smeared all over with a mixture of tar and oil, which drives them off. One man braved them in an unprotected condition, but in a short time his face was a bloated, gory mass, in which all traces of the original had disappeared. His horrified comrades besought him to spare their feelings and 'take the veil'."⁽²⁶⁾

Four years and two ore shipments later the Consolidated Mining Company, having acquired the Colchester mine in December 1880, left it to concentrate upon Little Bay. William Colchester departed from Newfoundland and took a job in South America, where he eventually died of a fever in 1891.⁽²⁷⁾

The Colchester mine had one last burst of activity. When The Newfoundland Copper Company reopened the Little Bay mine in 1898 it also leased the Colchester mine and, between 1898 and 1901, exported about 300 tons of ore from the property before leaving Newfoundland.⁽²⁸⁾

The years 1889 to 1898 were lean ones for Notre Dame Bay miners. Copper prices sat at a record low and the list of liquidated mining companies lengthened monthly. Most unemployed miners returned to their fishing boats, but a few took up the prospector's pick. In the fall of 1891 one such man spotted copper ore southwest of the Colchester mine and, next spring, made the long treck to the Surveyor General's office in St. John's. There he found that news of his discovery had preceded him and that a Liberal politician, A.W. McNeily, had already secured the property.

McNeily was a lawyer, choral singer and member of the London Society for Psychical Research.⁽²⁹⁾ He was also a shareholder in The Newfoundland Consolidated Copper Mining Company. Despite having voted the Mathesons out of office in the 1889 shareholders meeting, McNeily had no compunction about leasing his mine property to Messrs. Matheson and Company in 1892. The Mathesons, for their part, were in no position to be particular about their sources of copper ore: they needed new deposits desperately to supplement the declining Little Bay reserves to keep the Little Bay smelters in operation.

The Little Bay mine manager, Andrew Whyte, began to develop the McNeily mine in 1892. He, mine captain John R. Stewart and a handful of Little Bay miners raised 650 tons of ore, ran it through an on-site crushing plant and cleared a road between the two mines preparatory to carrying the ore to the smelters. However, when the Little Bay mine took a sudden turn for the worse, Whyte and Stewart hastened back to Little Bay and left the McNeily mine to its fate. Not until 1897 did John Stewart (by then the Little Bay mine manager) return to the site with men and horses, and haul the raised ore along the overgrown road to Little Bay.

That one haulage plus another shipment made in 1898 by the Tharsis Sulphur and Copper Company from Glasgow constituted the only ore to leave the McNeily mine. Five thousand tons of ore, raised and left by the Tharsis company, remain on the mine dumps to this day.

The Little Bay and McNeily mines were the first ones worked by John R. Stewart. Born in Middlesborough, Nova Scotia in 1859, he came to Newfoundland in 1879 and gained employment with Messrs. Matheson and Company at Little Bay in 1881. The Little Bay mine collapsed in 1894, after which date he went on to manage the Mortons Harbour arsenic mine, Mings Bight gold mine, Buchans base metal mine and, lastly, the Kings Point or Rendell-Jackman mine at the bottom of the Southwest Arm.