Chapter V: Isle of Iron, Men of Steel  (continued)

DOSCO sold the Aguathuna land holdings back to the Newfoundland government for $1000 on 30 November 1966, but a large quantity of pure limestone still remained at the site. The stone attracted the attention of individuals interested in 'sea mining' for the metal, magnesium. They formed the Sea Mining Corporation and built a plant within the quarry to extract magnesium hydroxide from sea water using limestone as a precipitator. There the plant sits, unused to this day: financial troubles crippled the company before it could get underway.

Aguathuna now retains little of the character of its prime. The quarry, however, serves the surrounding area on a limited scale by providing stone for roadbuilding, breakwaters and the nearby Labrador Linerboard Limited operation.* Limestone being a multipurpose material, the quarry will undoubtedly remain partially productive for many years to come.

With the departure of the Dominion Steel and Coal Company from Aguathuna and Bell Island, the Newfoundland mining industry lost far more than a mainstay: it lost a powerful symbol of its continuity. As late as the 1940s the Bell Island mines still retained the flavour of a nineteenth-century operation, both in their mining methods and in their miners. Youths working underground alongside older men who remembered the first load of ore leaving Bell Island could not help but feel some sense of history about their job and company. From all accounts, relations between the miners and the local DOSCO management remained amiable to the end in what can only be described in these strike-filled days as a most nineteenth-century manner.

No such anachronism characterized the two other large mines in insular Newfoundland: Buchans and St. Lawrence. They were truly products of the twentieth century. They (and the Labrador iron mines) filled in the gap left by the cessation of the Bell Island mines and carried the Newfoundland mining industry forward into the 1970s.