Roots of History
The Gazette is digging into a different part of Sturgeon County’s history each month this year to commemorate the county’s centennial. Do you have a topic you want covered? Email [email protected] with your suggestions.
Cardiff: today, it’s a peaceful little bedroom community with a nice golf course and community hall.
But less than a century ago, it was a boom-town near the centre of Sturgeon County’s coal revolution. By day, almost a thousand residents would head underground to hack away at coal seams. By night, they’d head home to their ramshackle shacks and whoop it up over cards, chess, and booze, or perform with the local orchestra. At one point, residents staged a violent miner’s strike, one that left a policeman dead and a hotel burned to the ground.
“They had grocery stores, livery stables, schools,” said former resident Arlene Whitson, whose mother, historian Florence Vranas, studied the region’s history.
“They even had a whorehouse!”
It might not look like it today, but Sturgeon County was once a major coal centre in Alberta. That history, like coal itself, lies just beneath the surface, waiting to be dug up.
The coal boom
Sturgeon County has hosted about 55 surface and underground coal mining operations since 1887, suggests the Alberta Coal Mine Atlas. This is likely an underestimate, as many early mines did not bother to register with the province. With a few exceptions, these mines were concentrated around Cardiff, Carbondale, Manawan Lake, and east of the Sturgeon County Protective Services building.Coal from Sturgeon County mines was generally used for cooking and heating, said Merlin Rosser of the Musée Héritage Museum in St. Albert. Homeowners would buy it by the tonne straight from the mine and store it in either an outdoor or basement coal bin. Many homes had coal chutes for that purpose – you can still see one of those at the Little White School today.
Settlers would have been mining coal for personal use as early as the 1870s near what would later become Carbondale and Little Egg Creek, says Betty-Lou Kindleman, vice-president of the Namao Museum.
“The first pioneers saw the coal sticking right out of the bank,” she said.
The Lamoreux Brothers opened Sturgeon County's first registered mine, the Sturgeon, near Carbondale in 1887, the Coal Mine Atlas reports.
Kindleman said the first mines along Little Egg Creek were drift mines that went into the bank at the bottom of hills so the grades weren’t as steep. One of the first mines had a combination kitchen/bunk house made of logs, where the chef would use a frying pan to heat up beans, bannock, and, when they needed to give it more kick, blasting powder.
About 25 registered mines, all but two of which were underground, operated around Carbondale from 1887 to 1956, the Coal Mine Atlas shows. Those mines drew several hundred people to the region as well as a rail station in 1912, which took its name from the coal industry, Kindleman said. The community eventually hosted many small homes, a boarding house, two stores, a school, grain elevators, and a post office.
Coal came to Cardiff in 1895 when Edwidge Chevigny found some while digging a well, said Donna Garrett of the Musée Morinville Museum. A sign near Hole 7 of the Cardiff golf course marks where this coal was found.
Cardiff later hosted eight mining operations, the first and biggest of which was the King or Cardiff Mine. Named after a mining field in Wales, the Cardiff mine was at one point the second-biggest coal mine in Canada, the Morinville Historical & Cultural Society reports.
These mines made Cardiff a boom-town of almost 1,000 residents in the early 1900s, Vranas reports. The community boasted a boarding house, a United church, a 60-room hotel, dance hall, butcher shop, school, and what Vranas called “Nel’s establishment” – a brothel.
Ken Saunders, whose family has been in Cardiff since 1918, said Nel’s place was right next to the family farm, and that Nel herself was still around when he was a kid.
“I remember the neighbours would tease my grandpa (by saying) that his tractor was parked in front of Nel’s for quite awhile,” he said, with a chuckle.
Dirty business
All but one of Sturgeon County’s mines before 1940 were underground ones, the Coal Mine Atlas shows.Most early miners relied on hand or compressed-air powered equipment, as these were less likely to ignite the deadly methane often found in coal seams, reports the Alberta’s Energy Resources Heritage website. Horses or “pit ponies” were often used to haul carts. Kindleman notes that many such horses were stabled underground, never to see the light of day.
Many mines used the “room and pillar” technique, where miners dug chambers out of coal seams and left pillars to support the roof. Former Namao resident Glen Gabby, 88, said that they used the “longwall” method at the Penn/Banner mine near Carbondale when he worked there in the 1940s.
At the Penn/Banner mine, Gabby said miners would use a machine with an eight-foot long chainsaw to cut under a 300-foot long section of coal, drill a bunch of holes along the top, stuff the holes with dynamite and detonate it. With hands and shovels, miners would toss the now-shattered coal into carts that were pulled up top by electric winch.
The coal was dumped out and run over screens that sorted it by size, ranging from fine powders to small boulders, Gabby continued. Sorted coal ran down chutes to rail cars, where it was his job to shovel the material to either end of the cars.
“You had eight hours to load a car of coal. If you finished in five hours, they let you go (early),” Gabby said.
Gabby said it wasn’t too cold or dirty working in the cars, as the walls kept him out of the winter winds. Miners in the shafts would end up covered in soot, which they showered off using the copious amount of water pumped out of the mines.
Sundance Mines operated several strip-mines at Cardiff between 1945 and 1959, the Coal Mine Atlas shows.
These mines used heavy machinery to strip away earth and dig up coal, explained Herman Bokenfohr, 91, who worked several years at the Sundance mine as an explosives technician. It was his job to drill holes and use dynamite to shatter the coal so others could dig it up.
“The (Cardiff) shopkeeper, he was always mad at me,” he said, as his blasts would shake the wares from the store’s shelves.
This was dangerous work, as you typically were just 200 feet from the blast, Bokenfohr said. Equipment operators would also sometimes have their rides fall into old mine shafts that collapsed beneath them.
Injuries and deaths from accidents, fires, and explosions in Alberta’s mines were not uncommon, say historians.
Living conditions weren’t much better. Workers in Cardiff lived in hastily built shacks and could earn as little as 50 cents a day, which wasn’t enough to cover room and board, the Morinville historical society reports. Workers clashed with mine bosses over a lack of water, lockers, safety lamps, and medical supplies.
These and other pressures led Cardiff miners to unionize and strike in 1919, writes historian Anne Woywitka.
While that first strike fizzled out relatively quickly, a second one in 1922 and 1923 lasted many months, reports the Morinville historical society. Backed by American union reps, miners stopped all traffic a mile outside of Cardiff, greased rails to stop coal shipments to Edmonton, and burned the homes of any “scab” labourers.
When a group of about 40 county residents marched on Cardiff to try to breach the picket line, a miner slew one of their horses with a pick-axe, and declared that his next victim would be a man, not a horse. The strike-breakers withdrew, dead horse in tow.
Woywitka writes that mine owners got rough that winter, using tractors to pull the homes of mine workers off company property, destroying some in the process. On Dec. 18, 1922, they sent a force of replacement workers backed by provincial police to force the mines back open.
A lookout spotted the brute squad and sounded a bugle to alert the miners. As the mass of men marched out of the darkness on silent feet, they ran into the first line of defence: the women of Cardiff, armed with stout sticks.
The two armies met in a frenzy of yells, shouts, and curses, Woywitka writes.
“Stick and clubs swung on both sides. Women screamed, men swore and struck and received blows in return.”
The strike-breakers breached the women’s lines and charged the mine-workers behind them, the women in hot pursuit, Woywitka writes. Six people were seriously wounded in the resulting bloodbath, and Const. Olson would later die en route to hospital. The replacement workers later got the mines working again, with more police protection.
The strike started to crumble in early 1923 as residents tired of the blockade, the Morinville historical society reports. Things came to a head on Jan. 20 when the Cardiff Hotel burned to the ground. Arson was suspected, but not proven, as there had been about 40 strike-breaking workers lodged there at the time.
Over the following months, many picketers would be jailed, fined, and taken off welfare, Woywitka writes. Penniless, the miners were forced back to work, their goals unrealized. The strike was over.
Legacy of pits
In the end, it wasn’t strikes but oil and gas that ended Sturgeon County’s coal industry, say historians. Coal production plummeted Alberta-wide in the 1950s as the oil industry geared up and homes switched to natural gas heating. Commercial coal mining ceased in the county when the Egg Lake strip mine closed in 2004, the Coal Mine Atlas reports.Aside from some signs around Cardiff, a display at the golf course, and St. Albert’s Coal Mine Road, there are few reminders of Sturgeon County’s coal history today outside of museums. Cardiff and Carbondale have shrunk to a fraction of their former size, and subdivisions and the Cardiff golf course now cover the old mine sites.
But coal mining has had an enduring, sometimes unwelcome, impact on the landscape. Cardiff Pond is an old surface mine, for example, and many of the strange dips and holes on the Cardiff golf course are the result of collapsed mine tunnels. Saunders said that residents have been dealing with sudden pits opening up in their backyards due to mines for decades.
Saunders said few Cardiff residents remember the region’s mining history, but that many are interested in the topic when he speaks about it.
There aren’t any historic signs around Carbondale on the mines, and most recent residents don’t have a clue about that history, Kindleman said. The Namao Museum is looking for mining artifacts to remind people of this past.
“It was the livelihood for a lot of people for many years, and we’ve got nothing to show for it,” Kindleman said.
