Chapter II: Fever of the Copper Ore  (continued)

One day in September 1909, Esau Burt of Kings Point noticed copper mineralization while moose-hunting near Oval Brook. He mentioned it upon his return, never realising that the story would spread up Green Bay to Tilt Cove. The Tilt Cove merchant, James M. Jackman, heard of Burt's discovery and relayed the information to Robert Rendell in St. John's. Rendell filed a claim for the location and approached John Stewart, who was between jobs. Stewart accepted the position as mine manager, hired 30 miners and in November 1909 began mining.

The Kings Point mine absorbed nearly $43,000 of Rendell's and Jackman's money, but remained unproductive. In March 1912, Jackman became the manager of the Tilt Cove mine (the previous man having perished in a snowslide), and in March 1913 John Stewart died of dropsy at the age of 53. The two deaths disrupted the Kings Point operation and forced it to follow the other Southwest Arm mines into dormancy.

Halls Bay Mines

Springdale Peninsula in Notre Dame Bay is bound on the north by the Southwest Arm of Green Bay, on the south by Halls Bay and is named after the town of Springdale on Halls Bay's north shore. Springdale owes much of its prosperity to a recent phase of copper mining that occurred in the 1950s and '60s and saw the opening or reopening of the Gull Pond, Whalesback, Little Bay and Tilt Cove copper mines. Although Springdale residents may realise that these mines turned their community into a centre for mining supplies and services, few know of the old Peyton's and Sterling mines that lay behind the Springdale townsite.

A deputy surveyor, Thomas Peyton, discovered both the Peyton's and Sterling orebodies. He noticed the Peyton's deposit in 1875 amongst tree roots near Sullivans Pond and, like other gullibles, leased his mining property in 1878 to the Betts Cove Mining Company. Adolph Guzman developed the claim during much of 1879, removing hundreds of tons of ore from the locale to the Little Bay smelters.

Then late in 1879, Guzman ordered miners to fill up the Peyton's shaft with rock and to leave the site. Rumours flew from one end of Green Bay to the other! Some said that Guzman held a grudge against Peyton over a property dispute in which both men asserted their right to the Peyton's mine. Others believed that Guzman disliked the idea of anyone profitting from his labours. However, the miners whispered between themselves that the ore at the bottom of the shaft was so rich that Guzman wished to hide it from Ellershausen and to work it alone at a later date. Guzman himself said nothing and moved from the Peyton property to exploit the nearby Sterling claim.

The Sterling mine belonged to Thomas Peyton, Dr. William Stirling and two other men, at which time it was called only the 'Halls Bay' mine. Not until 1916 did Dr. Stirling's opera-singer daughter, 'Toulinguet Sterling', become a part-owner of the property and lend her stage name to the old mine.

Premier William Whiteway may have intended that the name 'Sterling' never reach the property at all. The same sheaf of telegrams that suggest Whiteway's influence in the fabrication of the Little Bay fee-simple grant hint that he also tried to alter ownership of the Sterling mien in the summer of 1880.⁽³⁰⁾ He chose a poor time: Stirling still rankled over his treatment in the Little Bay affair and was further distressed by his wife's serious illness. He threatened court action, and the matter mercifully dissipated.

Miners working on the Sterling property in 1880 nicknamed it the 'Whim Shaft mine' because of the horse-driven whim or winch erected over the shaft to pump out water and hoist ore. Between 1880 and 1882 they raised 240 tons of ore, some of which went directly to Swansea and some of which was treated first in the Little Bay smelters. When the final ore shipment left the Sterling mine in 1882, Adolph Guzman had miners sweep the copper dust from the bottom of the shaft and place it in canvas bags to be taken to Little Bay. This was probably the last Newfoundland mining job supervised by Guzman. He left the Island around 1883 for the United Sates and subsequently was murdered in Arizona.⁽³¹⁾

Clear Mines

No character in the story of early Newfoundland mines appears as consistently and in more divergent enterprises as Captain Philip Cleary. Between 1865 and his death in 1907, his name surfaced across the Island in ventures associated with marble, coal, asbestos, oil, pyrite and copper. It is sad that none of them ever made respectable profits while in his grasp.

One of the Cleary's two copper mines lay at Crescent Lake near Roberts Arm, 14 miles to the east of Springdale. Unlike the secluded Southwest Arm and Halls Bay mine site, the old Crescent Lake site lies in the centre of the Crescent Lake Municipal Park; its ore piles have long since been removed by Roberts Arm residents to form part of their community wharf.

The Crescent Lake orebody first came to light in May 1878 when lumbermen working in the area stumbled upon outcrops of copper ore along the north shore of the lake. Cleary, who already owned claims covering the deposit, obtained samples of the ore and showed them to officials of the Betts Cove Mining Company. To his delight, they pronounced them to be unusually high in copper and offered to lease the property for a royalty of 5 shillings per ton.

The Crescent Lake mine possessed remarkably sophisticated surface facilities for a small mine of its day, as its lessees, the Betts Cove and Consolidated mining companies, felt that the high-grade ore merited more than the usual hurried treatment. It had a sturdy two-mile tramway that ran from the mine site to a wharf at the head of Roberts Arm, a copper floor for cobbing ore and a crushing mill that operated on water power funnelled by a flume from a pond. Ore travelled on flat scows from the mine site on the north side of the lade to crushers on the south side before being rolled to Roberts Arm. About 1260 tons of ore left the Crescent Lake mine between 1879 and 1881.

It appears that Cleary became somewhat of a thorn in the side of the last Crescent Lake mine manager, a Mr. Rutter. Rutter's increasingly frustrated telegrams to the Consolidated Mining Company show that Cleary accused the company of paying him less than his rightful royalties - "Must I pay Cleary other than minimum royalties?"⁽³²⁾ and that Cleary laid claim to the surface facilities - "Please inform Cleary that the machinery belongs to the company."⁽³³⁾ In the fall of 1881 Rutter could stand no more. He smeared tar over the ore exposures in the shaft and recommended that the Consolidated Mining Company leave Crescent Lake. It did so.

Captain Philip Cleary's experiences with the Consolidated company left him undaunted, and in 1893 he approached Messrs. Matheson and Company again with ore samples from another copper property found at Miles Cove on Sunday Cove Island at the mouth of Halls Bay. The Mathesons brusquely dismissed the ore as "unmarketable"⁽³⁴⁾, but Cleary put their opinion down to pique over the Crescent Lake affair.

In 1898, the Tharsis Sulphur and Copper Company came to Newfoundland from Glasgow on the wave of revived international copper prices, looking for copper mines to lease. If the company's representatives had been less anxious to obtain property they might have suspected Cleary's eagerness to woo them onto Sunday Cove Island. Only after they had optioned his Miles Cove claim and exported 210 tons of copper ore did they realise that the ore was indeed 'unmarketable'. The mine fell into disrepair after the company left in 1899 and today is indistinguishable from the surrounding countryside.

Pilleys Island Mine

Immediately eastward of Sunday Cove Island lies Pilleys Island, with dark volcanic rocks stained in places by rusty-yellow mineralization. The striking pattern led local people to call one particular cove "Bumble Bee Bight"; it also lured Philip Cleary to stake a claim around Bumble Bee Bight in the late 1860s.

In the process of exploring his property, Cleary came to recognize that its orebody consisted mainly of pyrite, an iron sulphide mineral that at the time fetched only 24 shillings per ton. Cleary could not lease such a claim and on 28 December 1885 sold it instead for $13,000 to Archibald MacNichol of Maine and James Murchie and Lewis Mills of New Brunswick. Cleary thus disposed of his one valuable mineral holding, as the ore later supported Newfoundland's largest pyrite mine and was smelted for iron, copper and sulphur.