You may have visited the Ovens campground and park—maybe tried your hand at gold panning on the beach—or at least seen Joseph Purcell’s painting of the gold mining camp there, or perhaps you’ve noticed a sign for Blockhouse Mines Rd while driving on the 325. Few people know, however, that there was once a very real (albeit short-lived) gold rush in Lunenburg County, and that there are former gold mining sites all around, including at the Ovens and in Blockhouse, Indian Path, Gold River, Vogler’s Cove, Clearland, Stanburne, and near Milipsigate Lake. For a few short decades following the 1860s—and every now and then ever since—the Nova Scotia government and adventurers from far and wide dreamed about the province making them rich in a gold rush rivalling those in the Yukon or California. In fact, many Nova Scotians left the province for Australia, California, and especially the Yukon to stake a claim and try their luck.
Gold was first verifiably discovered in Nova Scotia in September 1858 on the Tangier River near Mooseland by British army officer Captain Champagne L’Estrange, although tales of gold in the province had been around much longer. As with any story of “discovery,” it was really only a discovery for L’Estrange. He was guided around Musquodoboit on a moose hunting trip by three Mi’kmaw guides: Noel Louis, Joe Paul, and Frank Cope. Mi’kmaw hunting guides were routinely hired by American and British fishermen, hunters, and tourists, and were well known for their expertise. L’Estrange had been born in Ireland, was an artillery officer in the Crimean War, and eventually served as a magistrate in Malta, where he died in 1900. It is not clear whether he actually benefited from the gold, but in 1860, he had a lavish house built in Dublin for his unmarried sister, Camilla, whose source of income was recorded in a census as “dividends.”
Joe Paul, along with James and Francis Paul, also brought a local farmer from Musquodoboit—one Mr. Pulsifer (or Pulsiver)—to Mooseland two years after the initial discovery, in the spring of 1860, and Pulsifer found gold in the quartz in a creek there. The Mi’kmaq knew about gold, but Pulsifer—and men like him—saw wealth. He even (unsuccessfully) petitioned the House of Assembly to be officially recognized as the “discoverer of the first worked gold district.”
Only a few weeks later, Joseph Howe, then Provincial Secretary, arrived to inspect the gold fields in person. By 1861, Mooseland and Tangier were officially proclaimed gold districts, and prospectors were flocking to them from far and wide: the first gold rush in Nova Scotia had begun in earnest. Mooseland and other gold mines in the Musquodoboit area and on the Eastern Shore have produced by far the largest amounts of gold—the aptly named Goldenville mine had been by far the most prosperous mine in the province during its lifetime.
In June of 1861, not long after the discovery in Mooseland, gold was discovered at the Ovens, just across the harbour from the town of Lunenburg. By late July and early August, newspapers were writing about a proper gold rush at the Ovens. Excited accounts repeated that the Ovens “supported a town of over a thousand miners, complete with hotels, stores, and a bank,” just like Tangier and other gold mining towns that had sprung up nearly overnight. The Lunenburg merchant Adolphus Gaetz, who kept a (now) well-known diary, mentioned the gold rush at the Ovens many times in the summer of 1861:
Friday, 28th of June, 1861: The Gold fever is now raging nearly over the whole
Province. This County is not exempt from the mania, at the “Gold River”
a few miles above the bridge, beautiful and rich specimens of Gold have
been found in small quantities.Thursday, 4th of July: Gold diggings. Quite an excitement prevails in our
town in consequence of Gold having been found near our doors. It having
been stated by some knowing one that gold was likely to be obtained about
the “Ovens,” some two or three sailed across yesterday to make an inspection, without hopes however of making Gold discoveries. The result of their
labours are some beautiful specimens of what all consider to be pure Gold.Saturday, 6th of July: The Specimens of Gold sent to Halifax for examination
have been declared as being the finest of Gold.Friday, 2nd of August: Within these few days past the diggers at the “Ovens” have discovered Gold amongst the sand on the Sea Shore. A young lady while amusing herself on the shore picked from the sand about two or three dollars worth without any exertion.
Thursday, 8th August: The Town this evening was crammed with strangers
bound for the Gold diggings at the “Ovens;” boarding houses and Hotels
were full to overflowing, numbers were obliged to pitch their Tents on the
Common.Friday, 9th of August: Whole talk is gold, gold, gold. Excitement intense…
Saturday, 31st of August: There are now upwards of 600 persons at work at the gold fields. A number of “shanties” have been erected for the accommodation of the “diggers,” and several grocery shops and Restaurants have been opened.
Tuesday, 3rd of September: Yesterday the gold excitement at the “Ovens” was raised to a high degree, by a Nuggett of Gold having been dug up by a man
named Crowel from his claim on the beach; this is the first nuggett that has been taken; it was brought to town to day and exhibited; crowds gathered to see the wonder of the day; it is of the shape here represented; . . . several persons offered as high as forty dollars for it, they intending to retain it as a specimen.
Miners were flocking to Lunenburg, and even the Cunards—the Halifax shipping family famous for the Cunard Line—bought up land on one of the beaches, and, unlike the individual miners trying their luck with their pans, are said to have had the entire beach dredged, loaded onto ships, and shipped to England for processing. Most of the gold found at the Ovens was recovered from these beaches. The gold rush there, like most, was short-lived—by 1863, the provincial gold commissioner complained about the drop in mining that year and blamed excessive investment in hotels and stores instead of in mining equipment. The Ovens, now a privately owned campsite and park, remains a popular tourist destination, but many other places in the County once had people mining for gold. James Meisner, a veteran of the 1861 gold rush who lived at the Ovens, was still panning for gold there in 1912, but by then, the gold rush had been largely forgotten.
Starting in the 1860s and continuing after Confederation, many Nova Scotia politicians—some of whom, like the Annand family, were themselves shareholders in mining operations—advocated for gold and other kinds of mining (such as coal, copper, or nickel) as a solution to the problems of outmigration and perceived lack of prosperity. Even though agriculture is the quintessential settler colonial industry, by the mid-nineteenth century, it was clear that the quality and quantity of remaining Crown lands—with Crown title imposed in breach of the Peace and Friendship Treaties—was not sufficient for new settlers to be able to receive land grants and create self-sufficient farming operations. Logging and mining partially replaced farming, as faith in progress and wealth rooted in land remained.
The mining agent and promoter Alexander Heatherington, best known for his handbook for prospectors and investors The Gold Fields of Nova Scotia (1868), provides an example of typical 1860s and 1870s mining boosterism, imagining that Nova Scotia’s time would eventually come and the amounts of gold would match the most famous gold rushes in the world, that it was quite possible that “when the rich placer washings of California and Australia have been exhausted, the rocks of Nova Scotia will be but beginning to exhibit the vastness of their stores of this precious metal.” (38) In his chapter “Advantages of Nova Scotia as a Mining Country,” Heatherington emphasizes the allegedly “inexhaustible supply of minerals,” but—most importantly—that “labour is cheap and can always be procured in proportion to the demand.” The 1860s-70s were the first gold rush in the province, and by the time Heatherington died in 1878, his obituary in Geological Magazine showed the industry’s optimism about the future of the province: “The province of Nova Scotia owes him a debt of gratitude for his persistent efforts to promote her progress, and bring her to the front as one of the first gold producing countries of the world.”
For a brief period around Confederation and into the 1890s, many earnestly believed that gold mining could bring prosperity to the province. It seems that very few people, however (if there were any who did so at all), saw any sort of lasting prosperity. Many miners were recent immigrants and transient workers, and most mines turned into a series of get-rich-quick schemes for American investors. This story appears to have been much the same at most sites in the province. Gold was reported on Cross Island, at the mouth of Lunenburg Harbour; in Blockhouse (on today’s Blockhouse Mines Rd), gold was discovered in the late 1870s, but most production took place between 1899 and 1901—around the time of the “second gold rush”—with some mining being revived in 1935 and 1936.
The Lacey Mine in Chester Basin, for example, was so unprofitable shortly after opening that by 1934, it had been taken over by the Department of Labour and turned into a training school. The objective was to train unemployed coal miners for work in gold mines, but others, like former fishermen, also enrolled. A 1937 booklet advertised free board, free instruction, and wages of 50 cents per day for men between nineteen and twenty-five years old and weighing at least 145 pounds who would be chosen from among applicants from the former colliery towns in the province.
Photo: Lacey Gold Mine Shaft and Outbuildings, Chester Basin, ca. 1934. Courtesy of the DesBrisay Museum, Bridgewater.
The 1930s and 40s saw another brief gold mining boom—or the “third gold rush” in the province, particularly on the Eastern Shore. Readers may have heard of the 1936 Moose River Disaster, when three men were trapped underground for ten days after a shaft entrance collapsed, and one ultimately lost his life.
Despite these periodic revivals, the “Golden Age” of gold mining in Nova Scotia was a period of less than twenty years between 1885 and 1903, with by far most gold extracted in these two decades, year-on-year. At the same time, the Klondike Gold Rush started in 1896, and many Nova Scotians left to try their luck panning for gold in the Yukon.
While gold mining in the province was revived for a fourth—if short-lived—round in the 1970s and 80s, as gold prices rose, the fifth wave of interest in gold mining in the province remains ongoing. As recently as 2016, a mining exploration company did sampling in Blockhouse to gauge the profitability of restarting gold mining there. Lunenburg County has been spared the environmental impacts of open pit gold mining, but the now-depleted open pit Touquoy gold mine in Moose River is a reminder of the environmental destruction that mining corporations like St Barbara (formerly Atlantic Gold) leave behind for local communities to deal with and for the government to clean up, all while the company’s shareholders benefit, and very few (if any) taxes are paid, and royalty rates are low. Premier Tim Houston wants more resource extraction in the province, including gold mining, and he has recently hired a long-time exploration manager at St Barbara, Tim Bourque, as the director of mineral development at the Department of Natural Resources and Renewables (DNRR).
Though unlike on the Eastern Shore, gold in Lunenburg County seems to be firmly a thing of the past, the provincial government has just issued a request for exploration proposals—without consulting the Mi’kmaq people, as required by the Supreme Court of Canada rulings on the duty to consult, or without informing the municipalities in question—for three sites with possible uranium deposits. This follows a revived interest in gold, lithium, and resource extraction in general, which includes the government lifting a ban on uranium mining that had been in place since the 1980s. The industry lobbying group Mining Association of Nova Scotia has had an influence on provincial policy, even supplying the language of the province’s updated critical mineral strategy. One of the three uranium exploration sites is in East Dalhousie, just on the Annapolis side of the Lunenburg/Annapolis county line. While gold mining in Lunenburg County remains a series of brief episodes in local history, the dream of unprecedented prosperity achieved through mining, first dreamt in the 1860s, has not gone away.
Further Reading
Tony Bishop, The Gold Hunter’s Guide to Nova Scotia (Nimbus Publishing, 1988).
Bruce Fergusson, editor, The Diary of Adolphus Gaetz, 1855-1873 (Public Archives of Nova Scotia, 1965).
Alexander Heatherington, The Gold Fields of Nova Scotia: A Practical Guide for Tourists, Miners, and Investors (1868).
David G. Jamieson, The Gold Seekers, Book 1, Volumes 1 and 2 (2005).
J. Oscar Young, History of the Ovens: A Story of the 1861 Gold Rush (n.d. – 1961?).
Jay Lalonde is a local resident and a historian.
