TRANSCRIPT

Interview with Isabel (Murray) McNeil, by Helen Sims

- Good morning. I'm interviewing Isabell McNeil of Malagash. Good morning Isabell.

- Good morning.

- I wonder if you could please tell me your full name, and where you were born?

- Well as far as I know I was born in Malagash. Isabell Murray McNeil or Isabell Christina Murray McNeil.

- And what year were you born?

- 1911.

- And what your parents names?

- My father was Peter William Murray. My mother was Dorothy Jessie Sutherland.

- And what did your parents do for a living?

- My father was a farmer and my mother had been a school teacher.

- Now when your dad was farming, I know there's a lot of salt in this area, did the salt ever affect the farming at all?

- Oh mercy no! He discovered the salt mine, but he discovered that because he had hired a man to bore a well because in those days the only wells they had on the farm over there when he bought it were a dug well. There was a dug well out in between the house and the road, where we got our drinking water; and there was a dug well, another dug well at the end of the barn, they watered the cattle. And on dry years when there wasn't a lot of rain, the wells would go dry, especially the barn well, would go dry. So they hired a man to come to bore a well near the barn for the cattle. So he he'd be able to get a good of flow of water for the cattle, and that's where they struck the salt, while he was boring the well there.

- So what did he do about it when they struck salt?

- Well they didn't do, he didn't do too much about it. He er.. in those days they didn't know anything about it except it was salt water. They didn't even know why the water was so salt. But the man come and bored wells in different places on the farm, and they bored in twenty some places and they got salt in most places. And there was one well right across the road from the farm that they put a pump on, and I remember they used to have a little tin mug hanging on the pump so the people coming along, going along the road, would stop and have a drink and try a drink of the stuff and test it. Actually when it was tested it was 98% salt.

- In what year did it finally become a salt mine in this area?

- Well it was about 1917, 1918, that they got the people interested in New Glasgow, the Department of Mines, I suppose. Chambers and MacKay. Mr. MacKay people called it around here but he called it MacKay, the Scottish way of saying it I guess. He was a man of, I don't why, but he was a wealthy man and Chambers was a man that was interested in it and had the education to know about the mine. And between the two of them they got the mine started in about 1917, 1918.

- So do you remember that when the mine first started?

- Oh yes, I remember that.

- And was it on your dad's land?

- Yes... well.... Just where the line fence where he and the next property, and the next property was owned by a Mrs. McKenzie, and there were no buildings on it. It was just a piece of land that she owned. And so the shaft, or the hole into the mine; my dad for some reason or other, didn't want it to go down on his property because it meant that the dump, or where they dumped all of the stuff that took out of the hole, he didn't want that on his property. It went the other way onto the other. So they bought a piece of property from the other lady, and that's where they made the shaft, joining the fence.

Isabell (Murray) McNeil