COMMENTARY — Early mining in New Brunswick

Mining in New Brunswick started in 1839. In that year, French sailors removed several chaldrons of coal from the Grand Lake area and sent them to Boston. The shipment represented New Brunswick’s first mineral production, and possibly the earliest coal exports from Canada.

Throughout the 1600s and early 1700s, New Brunswickers spent a lot of time battling the Americans and each other. No one had much energy left to discover mines, let alone to develop them.

People did not begin to work minerals regularly in New Brunswick until the Loyalists emigrated from the U.S. Farmers started excavating coal around Grand Lake in the late 1700s. They burned it locally or shipped it to Fredericton or Saint John.

Around the same time, Hillsborough residents discovered gypsum in their district. They called it “land plaster” and used it as soil conditioner. But despite these early activities, the New Brunswick mining industry existed, for many decades, in name only. Then came Abraham Gesner and, a few years later, the 1854 Reciprocity Treaty.

Gesner was a medical doctor and the credited inventor of kerosene. He also became the first provincial geologist of New Brunswick and produced reports describing valuable deposits in the province.

It is hard to imagine Gesner’s working conditions as he explored the province between 1838 and 1842. He travelled by foot, canoe and horseback. He mapped country that few white people had ever seen. For all this, he received about $1,000 per year, including expenses.

Gesner died in 1864 after a luckless and tragic life. But his reports prompted local prospectors to take another look at the province. The 1854 Reciprocity Treaty was a sort of 19th-century free-trade agreement between Canada and the U.S., permitting certain minerals to pass duty-free into the U.S. As a result, American and Canadian prospectors began to explore New Brunswick more closely, searching for the big find that would make them rich. Thanks to the treaty and Gesner’s reports, mining in the province blossomed after 1860. For the next 50 years, mines or quarries were opened on the following commodities: coal (numerous workings), manganese, antimony, iron, lead-zinc, copper, gold, molybdenum, graphite, nickel, asbestos, gypsum, salt, oil shale, gas, oil, albertite, limestone, granite, sandstone and shale. — From “Mineral Matters,” a publication which reports on activities carried out in New Brunswick under a federal-provincial Mineral Development Agreement.