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

Time revealed that the engineer advised his superiors badly and that the so-called Workington iron mine should never have become a mine at all. The deposit exists in small, irregular and non-economic veins or 'pockets'.

Henry Moore, resident manager of the Spencer company, did not suspect the ore's discontinuity at first, but did notice that Lower Island Cove lacked adequate shelter for a shipping pier. He hired 150 men to lay a seven-mile railway across the Bay de Verde Peninsula to Old Perlican. There, men converted 12 shiploads of wharf sticks, 3000 feet of lumber and 9 tons of nails into a sturdy pier. That done, they focussed upon the mine site. Slowly the property assumed an industrious air as men installed boilers, crushers and other apparatus together with a machine shop to service them. They also erected bunkhouses for themselves and luxurious houses for the managerial staff.

In implementing these elaborate measures Henry Moore committed the common error of squandering money-$250,000 by one account⁽²⁸⁾-on mine facilities before assessing its underground potential. Miners sank seven prospect shafts on the grounds trying to locate an orebody that did not peter out over a few yards. The shafts disclosed little regular ore; they did leak large amounts of water.

Moore's pessimistic monthly reports to the Spencer company alarmed two of its directors into visiting Lower Island Cove in October 1898. Four weeks after their visit, H. Spencer and Company subleased the Workington mine to the Newfoundland Iron Ore Company of Manchester for £8000 in cash and £12,000 in paid shares. The exact details of this transaction are uncertain. Was the Newfoundland Iron Ore Company a subsidary of the Spencer company? Or did the Spencer company lease the property to an unrelated (and obviously uninformed) company? Available records shed little light on the matter.

Throughout the winter of 1898-99, the Newfoundland Iron Ore Company raised several hundred tons of ore and made one trial shipment to England. The deeper miners sunk the main shaft, the more geologists saw the futility in trying to delineate a workable orebody. Operations came to a halt when Roland Barrett of Holyrood died in an accidental underground explosion. The company pulled out around the fall of 1899 and left the claims to revert to their original owners.

The 'original owners' were by them neither financially able nor inclined to promote their property abroad and so approached Robert Chambers of the Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company working on Bell Island. The ore's high iron content led Chambers to lease the claims, but after investigating the land in 1904 he dismissed any idea of development. Instead, he bought the boilers and company store; the former items went to the Scotia steel mill and the latter one was sailed to Bell Island and converted into a chapel.⁽²⁹⁾

All that remains of the Spencer company's $250,000 capital outlay is seven shafts, an ore dump and the road bed of the Workington railway. The shafts are slightly hazardous to walkers in the area; the railroad bed, however, makes a convenient means of traversing the peninsula in the berry-picking season.

Indian Head Mine

Indian Head mine, c. 1942. Ore slid down hill to loading platform and into waiting trucks (V/5.) (27Kb)

Women figured so rarely in Newfoundland mining that when one did appear she became the centre of suspicion. Early in 1914, Dr. Elizabeth Ingraham came from the United States to Indian Head near Stephenville with a diamond drill and a dozen drillers. Their purpose, she said, was to ascertain the extent of an iron deposit on Indian Head. Records show that she applied for a right-of-way into the area in November. Then at the outbreak of World War I she and her crew vanished, leaving everyone convinced that they had really been German spies!⁽³⁰⁾

The Indian Head iron deposits resembled that at Lower Island Cove: they were high in grade, but inconsistent in distribution. They might have remained untouched had not World War II disrupted European iron shipments to the Dominion Steel and Coal Company steel mill. In searching for an alternative supply of high-grade iron ore to mix with the lower-grade Wabana ore, DOSCO chose the Indian Head deposits: they lay just across Cabot Strait from the steel mill, and the company already had another operation, the Aguathuna limestone quarry, situated nearby from which to draw men and equipment.