Sydney (Nova Scotia)

For pictures, see greatmirror.com

Transcript

Once you’ve landed in Halifax–that’s the capital of Nova Scotia–head north.  After about 150 miles of four-lane freeway, you’ll drive along a mile-long causeway–a ribbon of broken rocks instead of a bridge.  Once on the other side, you’ll be on Cape Breton Island.  It’s still part of Nova Scotia, but now you have to adjust to two-lanes. The traffic isn’t bad, and two hours later you can be on the other side of the island and in its biggest town.  It’s Sydney, population 30,000, and it’s named for the same British colonial secretary who gave his name a few years later to what is now Australia’s biggest city.  Talk about different development paths.  Lord Sydney himself stayed clear of both Canada and Australia.  Never visited either one.

This Sydney, like the Australian one, has an excellent harbor, which is why you’ll find writers late in the 19th century, calling it Canada’s Front Door.  That phrase made sense when Europeans came  by ship, but they no longer do, and it no longer does.  Cape Breton Island does  have a small airport a few miles from Sydney, but it makes do with two flights daily, one to Montreal and the other to Toronto. In summer, there’s also a flight to Calgary.  That’s it, except that each summer about 100 cruise ships pull into town for very brief stays–rarely even overnight.  I didn’t see a single cruise ship during the week I spent in Sydney in June, 2026.  I was told the season hadn’t started yet.  This didn’t hurt me too much, though I admit I would very much have liked to have seen, if it had been possible, the harbor in World War II, when hundreds of naval and merchant vessels gathered here to form convoys hazarding the Atlantic.  The only reminder I saw of them was gun emplacements around the harbor’s mouth.

For now, leave Sydney and find a bit of coast either to the east or west.  

The ground you’re standing on will be very flat.  If it’s June, as it was for me, the ground will be covered with ankle-high grass wet from showers and, as T.E. Lawrence might have said in good humor, from skies that seem perpetually caliginous.  It’s a plainspoken fact that if you walk over the grass your feet will get wet if you’re not wearing rubber boots.  I wasn’t, and I soon had a collection of cold, soaking wet socks.  

The grass extends to a cliff.  One more step and you drop 40 feet onto a very narrow rocky beach from which you probably will not get up.  I saw very few signs warning of the danger, from which I conclude that Cape Bretoners–and they often do consider themselves Cape Bretoners first and Nova Scotians second–don’t think that it’s the government’s job to save people from themselves.  

You might think of those cartoon characters that run off cliffs, run in place furiously for a second or two, then drop.  Better, you might think of that scene in Robert Louis Stevenson where an upstairs door leads to nothing but a fall into the void.  I found the Cape Breton cliffs almost as scary as I found that story as a child.  It’s partly from the responsibility that was placed on my frail shoulders not to be stupid, and it’s also because the skies here were always begging to be called lowering.  

From the edge of the cliff, you’re likely looking in the direction of Newfoundland, but that island is over 100 miles away, and you can’t see it even on a clear day. Turn a bit to the right, and there’s the unfettered Atlantic.  The world for the moment consists of your cold feet on wet grass, a cliff in front of you, water below, sky above, maybe some birds, and probably a small boat lingering offshore.  There’s no commercial fishing here anymore–forget the once titanic codfish industry–but lots of boats chase crabs and lobsters, and you’ll find coastal villages with mountains of stacked traps.  They’re very atmospheric, but I didn’t like them.  Call me a bleeding heart, maybe a Jain far from home.  I admit that my sympathy for crustaceans is ridiculous.  Only a few hours ago I cooked and ate a ribeye steak.  In a cast-iron frying pan, please.  Simple is good.

There are bays along this coast where you can stand at the center of the curve and look right or left to see what the cliffs are made of.  You will see that the rocks are in layers not stacked vertically or horizontally but gently sloping down toward the water.  Occasional layers are coal-black, which is not surprising given the fact that they are just that, beds of coal.  Sydney was Canada’s most productive coal-mining area in 1900, which means that its miners necessarily worked in tunnels that gradually extended several miles offshore.  

This is not the only place in the world where coal was once mined underwater–it was mined that way on the west coast of Canada, not to mention Japan–but that doesn’t make it any less sobering.  I should probably just step up and say frightening, because that’s really what I mean.  Fortunately, in this context, I’m relieved to say that coal mining in Nova Scotia is dead.  Work at the only mine making even a pretense of being in business when I came by had been suspended for three years because the roof had collapsed at two places.  There had been at least one earlier collapse, too, along with a suspension.  

Near the mine’s gate a friendly guard was walking with a friendly dog.  A big sign said Keep Out.  They enforced it.  Next to it, another sign had only two words written in huge letters spelling “Ambulance Entrance.”  Now that’s sobering.  Reminds me of signs I saw many years ago on a very quiet highway outside the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State.  The signs were fitted with yellow lights and told motorists to turn on the radio if the lights are flashing.

Between 1900 and World War I, Sydney not only had fifteen or more active coal mines but two integrated steel mills fed on a diet of local coal and high-grade iron ore shipped from Newfoundland.  The logic was that the ore could be brought over cheaply, cooked with local coal, then shipped from Sydney’s fine harbor to North American and European markets.

One of the two mills was in Sydney proper. It sank into perpetual financial troubles shortly after World War I and was eventually nationalized before finally closing in 2000.  Other mills, for example the original Bethlehem Works in Pennsylvania, have been partially preserved as monuments to remind us who we were and what we did, but by the time Sydney’s mill finally closed the community was financially and emotionally so exhausted that the old mill was simply wiped off the face of the earth–remediated, in the euphemism–and replaced by a park.  It’s a pleasant park, with sports fields and playgrounds, and there are a few signs, one pointing to where the blast furnaces had been, but there are almost no physical remnants suggesting the scale of the enterprise.  

The town carries on but has yet to find anything remotely comparable to the excitement of the vanished mill.  The big attractions on Cape Breton Island today are the Cabot Trail, a 180-mile scenic road opened to the public in the 1930s, and Louisbourg, a French fortress demolished by the British in the 1760s but largely rebuilt since the 1960s.  People in Sydney ask if visitors have seen these places.  Visitors are urged not to miss them, but the people of Sydney don’t suggest things to see in Sydney itself, and it seems that there’s not much left in town to make the people of Sydney feel proud to call it home–nothing until you get them talking about their grandparents.  Then it’s different.  One man told me that his father had worked as an electrician in the steel mill, and saying it made him feel so good that he said it again, the second time more quietly, reflectively, savoring the memory.

The second steel mill was across the harbor in a much smaller town called Sydney Mines.   Nobody had heard of remediation when this mill closed just after World War I.  The buildings were demolished, and the metal bits were carted away, possibly to be melted as scrap or just dumped in the ocean.  The rest was left in the weeds.  There are no historic markers on the site, but Google Maps earns a gold star in my ledger for having placed two historic-monument symbols just outside town.  One is labelled “blast furnace,” and the other is labelled “open hearth site.”  

I couldn’t figure out how to get to either of them, because both were located in a strip of orphaned land wedged between two parallel but widely separated residential streets.  Eventually I saw a man playing on an ATV with his young son.  (ATVs are very popular in all the towns around Sydney.  Room to roam is not a problem.)  I told him that I wanted to visit the old steel mill but couldn’t figure out how to get there.  I feared he might not have a clue what I was talking about, but he told me that there was a footpath between two houses down the road a bit.  I said I didn’t want to trespass.  He said it wasn’t a problem, and he added that the ruins were pretty interesting.

Ten minutes later and with freshly wet socks, I was looking, I am pretty sure, at the base of a blast furnace, a circular oven that turned iron ore into hot metal.  I kept walking and came to what I suspect was an open-hearth furnace, where that same hot metal was converted into steel with what at the time was state-of-the-art technology.  

My confidence in identifying these ruins is somewhere between moderate and low, because mostly I saw only walls of vitrified brick.  Even if I’m wrong, however, especially with the open-hearth furnace, the site felt like an overdue reward, because the surrounding coal mines, like the steel mill in Sydney, had been parkified to the last syllable of recorded time.  

I understand that old coal mines are dangerous, and I’m not suggesting that old tunnels running under the ocean should be left open for history nuts.  Still, these mines once had large buildings and lots of equipment some parts of which could have been safely preserved.  None is left, not anywhere between Sydney Mines and Glace Bay, which is about 15 miles to the east and about at the eastern end of the coal field.

I had been repeatedly told not to miss Glace Bay’s Miners Museum, which offered not only exhibits but an underground mine tour.  I took the tour, but I found it uncomfortable, because the roof of the tunnel is five and a half feet high.  That’s the thickness of the coal seam. No point in digging a bigger tunnel than you have to.  Visitors must wear a hard hat, which is more than prudent but means that anyone over five feet tall will be continually bent over, unable to stand up straight while in the tunnel.  It’s an excellent way to get a glimmer of understanding of how hard work was in these mines. 

The hesitation you may hear in my voice–let’s call it my non-complaining complaint–is that the mine isn’t real.  It was dug in the 1960s after the wife of a Glace Bay storekeeper saw the industry dying. She spearheaded the creation of the Miners’ Museum and hired some superannuated miners to dig a pretend mine so people in the future would have some idea, just the barest idea, of what these places were like.  People on the museum tours are a little miffed to learn that the tunnels, starting  under a sign saying Ocean Deeps Colliery, never get under the ocean, but the tunnels do feel authentic, not only with coal walls but with working faces where drills are getting ready for blasting that never takes place.

That was the choice: a fake mine or nothing.  Well, not quite nothing: there are memorials honoring the men who died in these mines.  The best known is in New Waterford, between Sydney and Glace Bay.  Here, at Dominion No. 12 in 1917, a methane explosion killed 62 men.  Manslaughter charges were filed against several officials, but the trial judge, who had previously worked for the steel company, directed a verdict of not guilty.  Other than the memorial, there’s nothing left to indicate that there was a mine here except, over at the far end of the park, a line of three or four railroad hopper cars. They’re painted black, and just faintly suggest a line of hearses.

There’s another memorial not far from the ruins of the steel mill in Sydney Mines.  It recalls the Princess Mine Disaster of 1939, when a cable snapped and a rail car loaded with men heading down the sloping tunnel hit 80 miles an hour before crashing.  It sits just behind left-field on the local baseball diamond.

Someone will ask about cemeteries.  That’s good.  Here’s a gravestone: “In memory of Henry Purchase, killed in Explosion at Florence, Jan. 3, 1911, aged 30 years.” Below those words there’s a verse from the Book of Revelation: “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.”  I have no idea whether Henry Purchase was pious, but it is a fact that all the mining towns have very impressive churches, almost all, I think, of wood, but now missing steeples or more generally in need of upkeep.

I do like old cemeteries, especially if the stones are descriptive.  I thought one stone at Sydney Mines was unusually droll, though it had nothing to do with miners and though you may not hear the understated humor that I do.  It read: “In Memory of Charles MacDonald, Merchant of Sydney Mines….  He was an enthusiastic Highlander, a true friend to all in need, [he] possessed in a prominent degree many of the excellent qualities peculiar to the Scottish character.”

A more ubiquitous reminder of coal mining is the many surviving houses–hundreds, I would guess–built for miners and their families.  These homes are as standardized as blue jeans, and they were built in a style called Greek Revival.  I think that label is at least faintly absurd.  There’s no Pallas Athena here, no oracle of Apollo, but the houses do have two stories and a rectangular footprint.  The narrow side of the rectangle faces the street, so the steeply-pitched gable roof presents to the world a rooftop triangle that is theoretically suggestive of the Parthenon’s pediment. 

Many of these houses today have been fixed up.  They’ve often been lifted onto new foundations with stairs leading down to a basement where there’s a washing machine and a drier.  Upstairs, the old double-hung windows that must have rattled all winter have been replaced by double-glazed windows, still double hung but rattling less. 

The houses now often have central heat and sometimes even air, yet the floor plan is immutable.  The entrance is slightly off center on the front of the house.  Step inside and there’s a staircase on your left. A living room to your right.  A kitchen straight ahead down the hall, and, in the corner that you can’t see from the entrance, there’s a dining room.  That’s it for the main floor, so go upstairs–a dozen to a landing where you turn right for five more. The bathroom is on your right.  These houses are 100 years old, and I’m not sure if the bathrooms originally had tub, toilet, and sink, but they do now.  Forget a shower stall; there’s no room for one if you want to keep the tub.  The master bedroom is straight ahead from the top of the stairs.  The far wall leans inward to hug the steeply angled roof.  To the left from the top of the stairs there’s a short hall leading to two smaller bedrooms, one wall in each of them sloping to fit the roof. The materials are wood and plaster, none of your hollow-metal doors or sheetrock walls.

If you mentally arrange the world’s homes along a spectrum like a keyboard, these miner’s houses seem to me like Middle C.  They will never, ever grace the real-estate sections of The Wall Street Journal or The Financial Times, yet they are a great deal better than many other houses we can all think of.  I think of the sharecropper’s house that James Agee described so painstakingly in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  In comparison with that house, Sydney’s miners and mill workers lived in mansions.  The biggest problem was the stairs.  One man in his sixties told me he figured that one of these days he’d have to move. I don’t know what happened to aging miners in the old days.  It may just be that when they could no longer work they were kicked out of the houses, which certainly solved the problem of painful knees.

I like these homes even though they’re peas in a pod.  I’m all in favor of people gardening or not gardening to suit themselves, but the good thing about identical homes is that they do away with social hierarchy, just like the identical gravestones of the generals and privates buried in our national cemeteries.  I think that’s great, and identical homes open at least the possibility that people can concentrate on more important things.  I say this, of course, after 20 years ago adding a thousand-feet of space to my own home.   

I remember the first solid block I saw of miners’ houses. They lined up on both sides of the street as tidily as clothing on a store rack.  It was at the corner of 12th and Plummer in New Waterford and only a few blocks from the site of the 1917 disaster at Dominion No. 12.  

I specify the location because of that name Plummer.  My guess is that nobody living on the street today knows or cares who James Henry Plummer was, but in 1910 they certainly knew, because he was president of the Dominion Steel Corporation, which owned both the Sydney steel mill and the peripheral coal mines.  I suppose the company also owned the houses where the miners lived, just as it owned New Waterford’s company store.  

Plummer built a summer home in Sydney but lived most of the year in a now-vanished mansion in Toronto’s still-posh Rosedale neighborhood..  An old photograph shows him looking pleased with himself. I don’t hold that against him.

For the sake of the argument I’m going to call Plummer the third most important man in the history of industrial Sydney.  The second most important was Henry Melville Whitney.  This would hurt Whitney’s feelings, because he was the man who put together the whole thing, mines and mill, and would naturally have believed he deserved first place, but as someone I know would say, Whitney’s dead at present.  

Whitney was a Bostonian, rich from laying out Boston’s streetcar lines and selling trackside real estate.  He was also on the lookout for coal for the boilers in the steamships he ran between Boston and New York City.  

Whitney came up to Sydney in about 1892, bought a bunch of small mines east of town, and combined them into what he called the Dominion Coal Company.  (A little bit of patriotic gore never hurt anybody.)  He then realized that there was enough coal to fuel a steel mill.

Whitney knew nothing about coal or steel, but how much did J.P. Morgan know about those things when he bought Andrew Carnegie’s company?  In Whitney’s case, the solution was to hire a man who I’m calling the most important man in the history of industrial Sydney.  

This was Graham Fraser.  His name sounds like it belongs to a stockbroker or Lexus sales manager, but Fraser liked making excellent things much more than he liked the idea of building a fortune.  This would get him into trouble repeatedly with his partners, men he needed for the money they could raise.  Time and again, he’d want to reinvest profits that his partners wanted to collect as dividends.

Fraser grew up in New Glasgow, a town that we passed while driving north from Halifax to Cape Breton Island.  His schooling stopped at 16.  He moved to the states for about five years and trained in Rhode Island as an ironworker.

He returned to New Glasgow and opened a forge where he converted pig iron into steel farm and railway equipment.  The site today, in the New Glasgow suburb of Trenton, has been repurposed for factories unrelated to steel.  

A few miles south of New Glasgow, at the now-vanished company town called Ferrona, Fraser built a blast furnace to produce pig iron from a local ore deposit.  He travelled to Europe to learn the latest production methods and soon had an integrated operation starting with iron ore and ending with harrows for farmers and axles for railroads.

There are no signs or markers to help you find Ferrona.  Even Google Maps falls flat, but I knew the approximate location from old maps and  found on Google Maps, near a village called Eureka, a patch of startlingly bare ground surrounded by forest.  I went out there and found mounds of vitrified brick waiting for eternity.  Reminds me of the quarries in Egypt where stone sarcophagi have lain in the dust ever since they were somehow spoiled and abandoned.  

Fraser realized that to expand his business he should move to Cape Breton for its coal and its access to the far more abundant iron ore of Newfoundland.  The result was the mill whose ruins I had poked around at Sydney Mines.  

Once again, as at New Glasgow, Fraser had a falling out with partners. He walked away from the Sydney Mines mill and offered his services at Whitney’s new mill, six miles away in Sydney.  It was having trouble getting going, and Fraser could fix it, even if his former partners at Sydney Mines stewed.

Two years later, mission accomplished, he moved back to New Glasgow, became the mayor there, and took up boatbuilding.  Small boats.  Nothing heroic.  Call it a retirement hobby.  I call it a happy ending, and I call him the most important figure in the history of Sydney’s steel mills because I prioritize making something over rustling up the money to pay for it.

Yet I must recant, not to downgrade Graham Fraser but to acknowledge somebody still more commanding.  His name was Richard Brown, and he was a British mining engineer who arrived in Cape Breton in 1826.  At that time, a British company called the General Mining Association had just won from King George IV a monopoly on all mining in Nova Scotia.  It would last until 1858, a few years before Richard Brown retired in 1864.

Under Brown’s direction the General Mining Association built a cluster of mines near what naturally became the town of Sydney Mines.  By 1832 the company was exporting coal from piers at a town two miles away called simply North Sydney.  It’s the place where today you catch the car ferry to Newfoundland.  The sailing takes seven hours.

Brown was succeeded in 1864 by his son, also called Richard but distinguished by the middle initial H., for Henry.  Richard H. Brown stayed on the job himself for 37 years until selling the whole kaboodle to none other than our friend from New Glasgow, Graham Fraser, who went on to build the steel mill whose ruins I had poked around.

The Browns, father and son, were, as the British say, chalk and cheese.  The son was  physically elegant and coldly meticulous.  His daybook for March 29, 1881, notes that “Boy Bob Burchell… was killed in the pit at 3 p.m. by trying to get on trip of tubs and falling between them.”  The handwriting is precise.  The pen skips a line and continues: “Started about 20 men to clear railroad of snow.” 

Brown senior, on the other hand, belongs to that small group of men who explored chunks of the world to unearth the resources that have given us lives that, in the eyes of our ancestors, are inconceivably comfortable.  I suppose that’s grandiloquent, but Brown had the major task before opening any coal mines of deciding where to put those coal mines.  He did this so well that a successor in 1940 wrote that Brown’s  “careful and accurate work… in mapping the Sydney coalfield, his delineation of the seam outcroppings, then concealed by a pathless forest, his measurements of the strata along the sea frontage, presumably with the aid of small sailboats, remain a constant marvel to coal-seam students of a later generation.”

Excellent photographs survive of both father and son.  The son appears firm but gentle, confident in his position.  The father, shown at perhaps age 50, is restless.  

The image of the father is a three-quarters view, not quite in profile.  Brown wears a frock coat and a stiff collar and a tie that’s hard to see.  His right arm rests on a shelf of some sort, while his left holds some papers.  His back is relaxed yet ramrod straight.  

Brown senior has a straight nose, a high forehead, a classically brachycephalic skull.  His hair is brushed back and clipped above the collar.  It looks as if Brown might have cut it himself to get it over with.  There’s a slight tension in the eyebrows, and the mouth is ready to ask if the daguerrotypist is done yet. Richard Brown wants to get on to whatever’s next, and whatever that is has something to do with coal.

For me, he looks like Captain Ahab.  Not a crazy Ahab–but, then, I’m not at all sure that Melville’s Ahab was crazy, either.  Brown certainly and Captain Ahab possibly are tremendously focussed.  I understand that lots of professional people today work, as we say, 24/7, but even the techbro knows how to relax in public and how to enjoy his wealth in rare moments of expensive leisure.  That’s not Richard Brown.  If you want to see the difference between him and busy people today, imagine a therapist suggesting to him that he needs to adjust his work/life balance.

Brown wasn’t alone.  I think you can see the same intensity in many 19th century leaders, from John Lawrence in India to William Tecumseh Sherman in the United States, but what they have in common is a life much physically harder than the lives of their descendants.  Life for men like Brown was deadly serious.

I think you can see their seriousness in Nineteenth Century cities, which, like all humanized landscapes, mirror the attitudes of the people who built them.  Sydney in 1900 had a main street lined with three and four-story masonry buildings.  They’re gone now.  The sole survivor is the former Bank of Montreal branch from 1902.  It’s at what was the town’s premier downtown corner, Dorchester and Charlotte.  

It’s an elegant building, just one story, sandstone, with cross-gables intersecting beneath a copper-clad dome, and with genuine Greek Revival facades on the two sides facing the streets.  Inside, the dome rests on four semicircular arches rising above the base where people once worked and banked.  There’s nothing elaborate in the decoration, but it all seems elegantly proportioned and detailed.  The Bank occupied the space until 2016, which astonishes me.  Today it’s a museum, closed when I was in town but promising.  I got a peek inside.

Sydney’s working branch of the Bank of Montreal today is a half mile away, on a site with lots of parking.  The bank’s building is a single-story, face-brick-block so plain that it makes the A&W drive-in next door look attractive.  Look around the parking lot and there’s PetSmart, the Great Canadian Dollar Store, and Shoppers Drug Mart.  

I walked down Charlotte Street, where the bank used to be.  I give the town credit for spending some money recently to widen the sidewalks and slow down one-way traffic.  I give more credit for plunking down what I call Adirondack chairs.  Here they’re called Muskoka chairs, after the cottage district north of Toronto.  Somebody was trying to make the street inviting, but to paraphrase the great communicator of our time, Sydney today doesn’t have the cards. With the exception of the old bank, there are no buildings left on the street that any visitor would take a picture of, and the city’s old buildings are so removed from people’s minds that nobody has posted a walking tour with photographs showing what the street looked like once.  

The center of gravity has moved, as it has in most towns where people get around in cars.  The two-lane highway that came across the island swells to four lanes for about 20 miles in a loop around Sydney, North Sydney, and Sydney Mines, and inevitably two Walmarts have found spots close to it.  So have four McDonald’s and Cape Breton Island’s one Starbucks.   So has the island’s main hospital, which of course provides better care than anything Richard Brown even imagined.  

I’m not going back to his world.  It’s not even a serious question.  You should see how frantic I got last week when, in mid-summer the town where I live lost power for, in my case, 40 hours.  You’d think it was the end of the world.

Yet I remember a story I heard in about 1970.  A young man of about 25 had moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to the coast of British Columbia.  He was talking to a slightly younger man who was from “the Interior,” meaning anywhere in B.C. not on the coast.  The man from the Bay Area said that on a camping trip a month earlier he had been driving on a lonely highway during a thunderstorm.  A deer had run out of the forest and he, the driver, could not avoid it.  The grill and left fender of his ‘69 Chevy pickup were damaged but the alignment was OK and the engine ran fine.  

The Canadian asked if the American had stopped to make sure that the deer was dead.  The Canadian assumed that the answer would be “of course,” but the American looked blank and said no.  You should have shot it.  I didn’t have a gun. Then you should have cut its throat.  I didn’t have a knife.  The Canadian said nothing more, but his expression showed that he was surprised by the American’s ineptitude and his casual, unthinking cruelty.  The American could tell himself, reasonably, that nobody he knew from the San Francisco Bay Area would have acted any differently than he had acted.  Still, he went away subdued.  He felt diminished.  

That’s the whole story.  In 1970, unfortunately, the American would have to wait many years before he could console himself with a Venti Caramel Macchiato.