Malagash Salt Miners' Museum
Malagash, Nova Scotia

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The First Rock Salt Mine in Canada

 

 

TRANSCRIPT

So how was life in Malagash at the time? You were 16 you started you had just started at the salt mine. Obviously the population was a lot bigger, what was it like back then?

Well if we had a bad snow storm in the wintertime and it lasted a week, it wouldn't affect us at all because we had grocery stores. In the salt mine right down here we had a grocery store, a pool room, which is like a convenience store they call it today. We had a tea room where the ladies could go and have tea, a post office, a community hall and we had movies once a week. Pretty well self sufficient.

So that was all a result of the salt mine was it?

Basically yes.

So after you did the sewing of the bags do you remember what job you did after that? That was 1951 you said?

In 1952 when I got laid off my job in the wintertime, about February; I went to school in Sydney and took an auto body course. That Summer when I came back, finished it, I already knew who to weld and I knew how to paint, so I was only there four months instead of six, and I got called back to work at the mine. And I thought what's going on, this time of year we don't usually get called back to work. But they had decided that I would be working with CIL (Canadian Industries Limited); and they were going to try, Canadian Industries Limited were going to try and go underground and change the way that we dynamited the salt out of the face of the wall.So they put me with them and I worked there for about three months, I think it was roughly. Determining how to change the way we did it to get the salt out of the wall in bigger chunks, was what the idea was; because we couldn't sell the fines, couldn't sell all the fine salt. So underground they used a big undercutter which was like a big power saw with a twelve foot boom on it, and that cuts the bottom of the wall, and that's what makes the floor, or whatever you want to call it, nice and smooth underground. And then they drill every four feet you drill a hole about twelve feet deep in a sequence, and then you put dynamite in the holes with timers on them. And the first row of dynamite on the bottom goes out the first and that leaves room for the rest to explode to move out. And we had to change the way we did it. Instead of putting so much dynamite in and such a snap to the salt to break it all up, we started using tubes of salt made out of dynamite paper.

So how did that work exactly?

That helped, you got quite bigger chunks of salt.

So was the dynamite wrapped in some kind of paper?

Well the sticks of dynamite are always wrapped in paper, just like wax paper, they were about a foot long. And I should tell you that we had a special belt for carrying these salt sticks that I had. I used to make them up they looked exactly like a stick of dynamite because I was using the papers. And I had eight or ten of those on my belt one day, when I went to go underground I remembered that I had to get something out of the storeroom, so Iwalked in with all these sticks that looked like dynamite. The storekeeper took a weave one way and a weave the other, and he shot out the back door and that was it. He left the scene altogether, he thought I was going to blow the place up!

So did you make a special belt to carry those?

CIL had them; they were using them for carrying dynamite.

So you said it was better when they wrapped the paper around, how did that, it didn't break off such chunks?

Instead of filling the drill hole full of dynamite, we'd put a stick of dynamite, a stick of salt, a stick of dynamite, and a stick of salt and that would cut it in half. And then we changed that to one stick of dynamite, two sticks of salt, different measurements in the hole to see what we could do to make it work. And after a while we got it to work.

And that was pretty successful?

Yes.

 

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