I was recently asked to put together signage for a Little Bay walking trail. Unsurprisingly, one of those signs was requested to cover the cave-in. If you’ve ever been to Little Bay you know the town hosts a sizeable hole in the ground from a fairly massive mine collapse. I remember asking my grandmother about it as a child and I remembered her saying it happened before her time. This was backed up during my own investigation into the late 19th century mining operations. Mineral reports on the area told a variation of the same story. It goes like this: in 1893 improper mining practices lead to pillar robbing which caused the collapse resulting in the eastern portion of the mine to cave-in to the 1000 foot level. Some variation of that sentence was seemingly copied almost word-for-word for nearly 100 years. The earliest version I could find appeared in a pamphlet on Newfoundland mining from the 1930s. I had no immediate reason to think they had it wrong. Other texts, including “Once Upon a Mine” didn’t mention the cave-in at all. This was likely because they took the time to seek out an original source and didn’t find one. In those few cases they took newspaper coverage from the 1890s at face value. Those claim that the mine had shutdown due to copper prices and production costs.

I hadn’t yet looked too closely at the cave-in event itself mostly because I expected it to be fairly easy to confirm. I figured the reports had it right and I just had to narrow it down and highlight some details. This should have been easy enough. Just a bit of quick newspaper article grabs and away we’d go. In 1893 the Little Bay mine still had a lot of press coverage and an incident like this would be hard to miss. Frankly, I anticipated a lot of media about the event. The problem was that there wasn’t any. This was unexpected and confusing. Complicating this was the fact that the first few people I mentioned the cave-in to thought it occurred in the 1960s. The mine had briefly reopened in the 1960s. My own work focuses on the late 19th century so what I know about mining there in the 1960s comes from the general oral history but I knew about an accident taking place at that time. My mother had told me about it. Four men had been killed after they had accidentally drilled into water underground causing the mine to flood. She remembered that the men had been on the phone relaying messages of love to their families as they waited for the rising waters to drown them down there in the dark. It was a sad and gruesome story and it stuck with me.

I had mention of the event in the 60s causing some tunnels to collapse but they were from family oral histories. I had nothing official. I did some digging and finally found media reports about the event. I can now say it occurred on January 23rd 1965 and it claimed the lives of Wilson James Wiseman age 27, Joseph Eric Verge age 26, Jerry Esau Boland age 28 and Harvey Bennett age 42. But there is nothing about a massive cave-in and by all following accounts they drained the water and mining business continued as normal until operations ceased in 1969. I initially thought removed the 1960s event as an option. At least, it seems, I wouldn’t make a sign with the cave-in taking place in the wrong century – this was a small victory for someone who spends all his time researching the history of this place and, as it turned out, still wrong.

As mentioned above, I still had the absolutely bizarre problem of a complete lack of reporting on what surely was a massive event anywhere in media coverage in the year 1893. This was not due to a lack of attention. There were newspaper articles covering the town, the mine, and the shutdown itself running almost daily in a multitude of newspapers and not only for 1893. The Evening Telegram, The Harbour Grace Standard, and the Twillingate Sun were all covering the Little Bay mine and they were not the only ones. There was easily a full decade and a half on either side of that year documented on the regular without mention of the cave-in. The issue was obviously not a lack of media attention. I was starting to worry that the original mention of this 1893 date from the 1930s pamphlet was just wrong and that everyone citing it afterward did so without confirming it with any original sources whatsoever. 1893 appeared to be the year that geologists and government officials agreed on but it was noteworthy that none of them could give me the month it occurred let alone the day it took place. I’d been over the newspapers for the surrounding years but I couldn’t find reports for a massive mining collapse which surely would have been heard for miles. What I could say was that the mine was in trouble there in 1893. The mine closed operation by March 7th that year and again by June 28th the following year. By all accounts it closed because of copper prices and difficulties getting the ore up from the depths they’d reached. However, media did boast the value of investing in Little Bay mining shares during the period in between. This is mostly coming from the Evening Telegram as the Twillingate Sun for 1893 appears to be mostly missing.

I was no closer to finding the date of the cave-in than I was when I started looking into this. This was both frustrating and fascinating. I kept digging but the whole thing was super odd. My running hypothesis was massive cover up. I’d seen them do the like before as there was major media control during this time. The calls for investors was my best evidence. Perhaps they didn’t want the condition of the mine known fearing it could discourage a new company getting the mine off the ground again. I did find a mention in The Statist from 1899 stating “Little Bay mine which by accident caved-in” which at least gave weight to the mineral reports cited from the 1930s onward that claimed a cave-in took place at all and it placed the cave-in in the late 19th century. This was good, because, honestly, at this point I’d have started to suspect there never was a cave-in at the Little Bay mine at all if it wasn’t for one glaringly obvious fact – there is a massive hole in the ground which says otherwise!

I kept looking for a clearer answer. Here I was pretending to be some sort of expert on Little Bay history and I wasn’t even sure I’d gotten the right century for what was surely the biggest thing to ever take place there. It was mind boggling. It would be nice to date the cave-in more precisely than just 1893 – assuming the mineral reports got the year right. As it turned out they didn’t. Unlike the other newspapers The Weekly News mentioned a cave-in contributing to the shutdown of the Little Bay mine in an article from September of 1894. The cave-in is underplayed but at least it’s mentioned at all unlike the numerous other sources where it wasn’t. The thing happened! This placed the event “June last” and assuming that meant the last June it put the cave-in in 1894 not 1893. This lined up with the shutdown date. The Evening Telegram was the first to report the end of Little Bay mine’s operations on June 28th 1894. It neglects to mention anything about a cave-in but at this point that was almost to be expected. They don’t say that it happened but it had happened. It happened in 1894. It happened that year in June – likely late June as the Evening Telegram wouldn’t have been more than a few days getting the news.

The lack of coverage of that cave-in appeared to have been a deliberate coverup. It’s difficult to come up with any other explanation. In the years that followed any researchers that sought an original source for the cave-in either couldn’t find one and explained the mine’s closure without a cave-in following the narrative put forth by late 19th century newspapers about copper prices and the costs of moving ore from such depths. Or as many publications did they dated the cave-in as in the 1930s pamphlet on Newfoundland minerals which claimed 1893 for a date without offering a month for it let alone a day. The biggest error they made here was obviously getting the wrong year. It was no wonder I couldn’t pinpoint the event. Half the people covering the Little Bay cave-in thought it didn’t take place and the other half had no chance of guessing the day or the month, because as it turns out the earliest sources had got the year wrong. Ok, so one else had successfully found an original source for the cave-in since at least the 1930s – maybe ever. Researchers were left with either the option of no cave-in at all or an event dated with only its year and that was off by a year. So it looks like it caved-in in 1894 not 1893 and when you’re looking for event dates measured with detail missing the day and the month and mistaking a full year in multiple publications for nearly a full century is kinda a big deal.

I don’t know if I’ll ever find the exact day that Little Bay mine caved-in but it looked to have happened in 1894. I could say with some certainty that it took place in late June of 1894. It also looked like an awful lot of 19th century Newfoundlanders agreed not to talk about it it –  at least not in print.

I thought that put a bow on it but I had a small problem – everyone who was in Little Bay in the 1960s still thought I was wrong. Rhetoric abounded that the cave-in had happened in the 1960s. It’s hard to contend with living memory. It took some digging but eventually I found a geology journal documenting the 1968 collapse of the main pillar. This was a problem because now I had a story for a the hole in the ground dating it to 1894 but pretty solid evidence that it was put there in 1968. So after pouring over details for days my conclusions were still ahead by a century and now have the added problem of two apparent cave-ins evidenced by only one giant hole in the ground.

This Little Bay research is certainly a journey. Thanks for following along with it all. I hope you’re enjoying it!