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

Between 1941 and 1944, DOSCO operated four separate open-pit mines on the Indian Head property under the direction of Leonard House, son of the Aguathuna quarry manager. Leonard House still recalls how men removed the highest-grade ore with welding torches, and how ore cars had wooden wheels improvised during the wartime iron shortage. Trucks carried about 16,000 tons of ore along a makeshift road to the main road leading to the DOSCO pier at Aguathuna.

DOSCO never intended that the Indian Head mine be a long-term venture. As soon as the immediate demand for high-grade ore subsided the company instructed House and the miners to return to Aguathuna.

Aguathuna Quarry

The present-day town of Aguathuna sits 15 miles west of the Indian Head mountain range. Like much of the Port au Port Peninsula on which it lies, Aguathuna is grounded upon limestone, a rock that water can slowly dissolve into fanciful shapes and designs. In the late 1800s, British naval officers noticed that waves had carved cliffs surrounding one particular cove into the likeness of a club from a pack of cards.⁽³¹⁾ This feature coupled with the fact that a man named Jacob Bellows lived in the vicinity led the officers to call the spot 'Jack of Clubs Cove'. Only later did employers of the Dominion Iron and Steel Company alter the name to Aguathuna.

The Dominion company had for years used limestone from Marble Mountain or Cape Breton Island as a flux in its Sydney steel mill. The Marble Mountain material, however, was impure, of limited expanse and situated far inland; and in 1910 the company sent its assistant mine manager on Bell Island, Arthur House, to investigate the feasibility of quarrying Port au Port limestone. House and a friend rowed along the north shore of the peninsula throughout October and November 1910 and located the ideal site: Jack of Clubs Cove.

To House's initial dismay, the Dominion company approved of his choice to the extent of asking him to leave Bell Island and manage a limestone quarry at the cove. House at first regretted the posting, but later grew inseparable from the district. He became a corner-post of the quarrying community and invariably could be recognized at a distance by his horse-drawn Victoria wagon, which he drove around town long after the advent of automobiles.

Men hired from the north shore of Bonavista Bay and equipment to develop the quarry began arriving in Jack of Clubs Cove in the fall of 1911. House chose not to build a pier directly, for fear that autumn gales would obliterate a half-completed structure. Instead, he contemplated creating a pier on the winter ice, a bold scheme that had never been attempted in Newfoundland. On the advice of a foreman, he consulted Dr. Chase's Almanac and found that it predicted an unusually cold March, one that would lessen the possibility of ice melting before the pier had been completed. With that encouragement, House decided to implement the plan.

The men spent the winter of 1911-12 erecting the pier on ice using nearly two million feet of board lumber, most of which was hauled to the coast by horses and oxen. Every day men arrived expecting to see their handiwork floating offshore on an ice pan. Fortunately the almanac prediction held true, and on March 16 they cut through the ice and sank the finished pier to the bottom of the cove. They ballasted it with 30,000 tons of limestone, drove piles through the cribwork and then celebrated by cooking a turkey meal with all the trimmings; enough trimmings, in fact, to incapacitate themselves for two days.