Early mining Prior to European
colonization, the Joggins Formation and surrounding territory was part of the
Miꞌkmaꞌki, the traditional homeland of the
Mi'kmaq nation. French colonization city of the
Bay of Fundy began in 1604.
Acadian miners from
Beaubassin were the first Europeans to mine the cliffs at Joggins, taking advantage of the deposits less than a decade after
Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin visited the site in 1686. Though Franquelin failed to make any mention of coal on his 1686 map, the document precisely detailed the geography of
Chignecto Bay, and in a more detailed map published in 1702 he named the Joggins Cliffs "Ance au Charbon", or "Cove of Coal". The explorer
Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac reported coal in Chignecto Bay in 1692. According to a
travelogue written by
Robert Hale in 1731, coal had been mined from the Fundy Seam - one of the thickest coal veins at Joggins - for at least thirty years at the time of his visit, and though there are only sporadic allusions to these pre-English operations in written records the government of Nova Scotia recognized Acadian brothers René and Bernard LeBlanc as being the first to discover coal at Joggins in 1701. Eastern Acadia was captured by
Great Britain in the
War of the Spanish Succession and became the colony of
Nova Scotia; the territory was formally ceded by France in 1713's
Peace of Utrecht. Though the British had likely been mining at Joggins since the occupation began in 1710, the first official record of a
coal mine at Joggins was made in 1720, when
Governor of Nova Scotia Richard Philipps complained that the trade of coal between Nova Scotia and
New England was going unregulated. Captain Andrew Belcher was one of the first merchants to transport coal from the Acadian-run mines in Joggins to the city of
Boston, which was in the grips of a coal shortage in the 1710s, and after Belcher's death in 1717 his son
Jonathan Belcher continued to trade along this route.
Henry Cope's mine Governor Richard Philipps approved the creation of a government-owned coal mine at Joggins in 1730, to test the feasibility of both mining the resource and loading onto ships at the site. The project was led by Major
Henry Cope, who invested in the mine with his own money and enlisted the help of Boston merchants to help establish the mine at what is today known as "Coal Mine Point". Coal was first harvested from Cope's mine in April 1731, and the
Nova Scotia Council agreed to fund the project on 24 June 1731. Rather than load ships on-site, Cope had the coal transported by small boats from Joggins to a
wharf at the mouth of Gran'choggin (present-day Downing Cove), a creek north of the mine. The name "Gran'choggin" represents the earlier known use of the name that would give rise to "Joggins", and is likely either a
Romanization of the
Mi'kmaq word "chegoggins" (English: "great encampment") or a portmanteau of the French word "grand" (English: "large") and Mi'kmaq word "choggin" (English: "creek"). Tides in the Bay of Fundy made docking in the Gran'choggin wharf difficult. Robert Hale arrived at the mine on 25 June 1731, recording in his travelogue that it took nineteen days for his
schooner, the
Cupid, to travel from Boston to Joggins, but it wasn't until 26 June that the ship was able to dock at Gran'choggin. Hale observed that a single miner could produce many
chaldrons of coal each day, and that the
Cupid was only the third ship to be loaded with coal from Cope's mine. The
Cupid departed Joggins on 30 June, loaded with sixty tons of coal to be sold in Boston. Henry Cope and his fellow developers were granted a
land grant to develop a area around the mine on 21 June 1732. By the terms of the land grant, several names in the area were changed: the cliffs were renamed to "Adventurer's Clifts" and Gran'choggin to "New Castle Cove". The land grant also stipulated that Cope pay a tax of one
shilling and
sixpence for every chaldron mined, send coal to
Annapolis Royal to support military
fortifications there, and begin construction of a town that would be named "Williamstown". To further support the venture, Cope demanded his crew of miners - about a dozen local Acadians - pay him rent in exchange for living on his land and working in his mine. The men conspired with their Mi'kmaq neighbours, and a group of three Mi'kmaq men raided Cope's land in 1732. The mine, storehouses, and Stanwell Hall (the first house built by Cope at the site) were destroyed in the attack, setting back operations substantially. Cope was soon unable to make funding for the project stretch, and after he defaulted on paying wages to his workers the mine was abandoned in November 1732. With the support of Governor Richard Philipps and
James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos, Cope attempted to restore the mine in January 1733. As a condition of his sponsors, Philipps was tasked with building
blockhouses at the top of the cliffs to provide the site with military protection. Though at least some of the necessary fortifications were built, the project was again abandoned by Cope, ending all operations at the mine.
British settlement British
cartographers Edward Amherst and George Mitchell scouted the region in 1735, renaming the Adventurer's Clifts to "Grand Nyjagen".
Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Lawrence Armstrong was insistent on having the area colonized by British settlers as it would secure their dominance in the region, which was still largely populated by the Mi'kmaq and Acadians. On 30 August 1736 a land grant was approved for the area around the northernmost reaches of the Grand Nyjaden for the purposes of establishing a town named "Norwich" (present-day Minudie), but the community failed to be established and was dissolved on 21 April 1760. Also in 1736, Captain Thomas Durrel produced his own map of Chignecto Bay in which he referred to the cliffs as "Sea Coal Cliff" and New Castle Cove as "Grand Jogin". Acadian settlers continued to establish themselves in the region after the failed attempt to establish Norwich. In this period, the Acadians again began to mine for coal along the Grand Nyjagen cliffs and elsewhere, digging a line of coal pits from the coast to
River Hebert, which came to be called the "Rivère des Mines des Hébert". A geographical description of Nova Scotia was published in
The London Magazine in 1749. The article commented on the abundance of coal in the Bay of Fundy, referenced Henry Cope's failed mining project, and assured readers that "a better use will, doubtless, be made of this treasure, when Nova Scotia itself comes to be inhabited". took over nearly all Nova Scotian mining operations in 1827. In 1825, the Duke of York had been deeply in debt to
Rundell, Bridge & Co. when the firm learned of the 1788 lease that would have granted him mineral rights to all of Nova Scotia. A mining engineer was sent by Rundell, Bridge & Co. to scout Nova Scotia for copper, and while little of it was found the engineer reported that the colony was rich in coal. At the firm's insistence, the 1788 lease was rewritten to include coal and approved by
King George IV. According to the new terms, this granted the Duke mining rights to the following for the next sixty years: Once the lease was issued, the Duke subletted it to Rundell, Bridge & Co. in exchange for 25% of all
profits they generated off the minerals it covered. Rundell, Bridge & Co. founded a new firm, the General Mining Company, which would manage their Nova Scotian properties from
London. Taking advantage of the region's natural resources, particularly coal, was imperative to the growth of
British North America:
fuel was hard to come by, the
anthracite mined in the
Coal Region of
Pennsylvania being difficult to use and
bituminous coal from the
Appalachian Mountains proving costly to transport. The Association focused initially on deposits in
Pictou and
Sydney, where they were able to buy leases on preexisting mines and take advantage of infrastructure that was already in place. After acquiring the rights to
Cape Breton (which had to be negotiated for separately) the GMA had established a
monopoly over all the mines in Nova Scotia, and the
Nova Scotia House of Assembly discouraged competition by refusing to grant leases to new mines even if doing so would not violate the terms of the Duke of York's lease. Though Des Barres's land claim had expired after his death, the GMA did not immediately make an attempt to establish themselves at Joggins, and actively discouraged anyone else from mining the Joggins Formation. Despite their urgings, small groups of
Cornish settlers continued mining exposed coal veins in the area. By 1836 an illegal mine had sprung up around the King's Vein, accessed through an
adit dug into the cliff wall where an outcropping had once been apparent. Abraham Gesner returned to Nova Scotia in 1844 to petition the House of Assembly for the rights to mine at Joggins, as he felt the coal reserves had gone unused for too long and a shortage of firewood in
Cumberland County provided ample opportunity for a new source of fuel. The colonial government, which had previously protected the General Mining Association from any threat of competition, had begun to change its stance on the GMA's monopoly: it was coming to light that the firm was offering discounts to American buyers but not Nova Scotians, and an 1842 report commissioned by Lieutenant Governor
Lucius Cary suggested the GMA was poorly managing the Albion Mine in Pictou. The government decided to approve Gesner's request. To preserve their dominance in the colony, the GMA subleased a tract of land near the community of Joggins Mines (present-day Joggins) and opened the Joggins Mine in 1847. Joggins Mine was a
shaft mine roughly deep, accessing the King's Vein from above and using a
horse gin to raise the coal to the surface, where it was loaded onto a
narrow-gauge railway and transported to a pier near Bell's Brook to be loaded onto ships. The GMA hired Joseph Smith, manager of their Pictou mine, to oversee its early operations. Much of the coal mined at Joggins Mine was sold to buyers in
Saint John, New Brunswick. Joggins Mine cost £16,000 to build, and after the initial start up costs were covered the GMA invested minimally in the site. The General Mining Association lost many of its claims in 1858, but retained the right to mine from the Joggins Formation. By 1866, the Joggins Mine was producing an average of 8,478 chaldrons of coal per year, making it the least productive of any GMA mine in Nova Scotia. However, the Joggins Mine required only 9
horsepower of
steam to operate normally and thus produced 943 chaldrons for each unit of horsepower expended, far more efficient than any other owned by the GMA. The lycopsid had fallen from the cliffs, and has previously been entombed in Coal 15. Lyell and Dawson also discovered fossilized
millipedes in the lycopsid trunks, and fossils of the
land snail Dendropupa. Among other things, the evidence of "reptile" (the distinction between
reptiles and
amphibians had yet to be made clear in 1852) fossils in strata of such age would disprove the argument made by proponents of
catastrophism that
Palaeozoic fishes had lost global dominance to the reptiles amid a worldwide catastrophe at the beginning of the
Mesozoic era. Following the expedition, Charles Lyell took the fossils to be studied in
Boston, where they were studied by
Louis Agassiz and
Jeffries Wyman at Harvard University. Agassiz first dismissed the remains as belonging to a
coelacanth and Wyman believed they were those of a marine reptile related to
Proteus anguinus, but after working the fossils out of the stone they'd been recovered in the scientists confirmed that the fossils represented bones from two reptiles: seven
vertebrae and an
ilium. At the time, only four
tetrapod specimens had been recovered from coal formations around the world, meaning the eight bones recovered by Lyell and Dawson represented one-third of all
Carboniferous tetrapod fossils. Lyell communicated this discovery to John W. Dawson in a letter on 6 November 1852, and publicly announced them in a series of lectures - the "Lowell lectures" - delivered at the
Lowell Institute several weeks later. It was around this time that Lyell and Dawson became aware of William Logan's 1843 survey of the Joggins Formation, and on 16 December 1852 Lyell sent a request to Logan for a copy of his work to compare against their own. Logan insisted in a letter dated 10 January 1853 that he had already sent Lyell a copy years earlier when his report was first issued, illustrating the ambivalence the researchers had towards each other. Lyell and Dawson's discovery was relayed to the
Geological Society in
London on 19 January 1853, but unbeknownst to either of them a
postscript had been added to their paper by
Richard Owen, who had described and named the fossil as
Dendrerpeton acadianum. In 1855, Dawson collected his and Lyell's research on Joggins into
Acadian Geology, a text that drew serious interest from geologists across England and the United States. 1855 also marked the only trip that
Othniel Charles Marsh made to Joggins. Marsh had only recently begun to study at
Yale University and was likely drawn to Joggins by the abundance of fossils described by Charles Lyell and John W. Dawson. Marsh returned to Yale with two vertebrae, which he described in 1862 as belonging to the marine reptile
Eosaurus acadianus. Six years later Dawson commented that Marsh's description of
Eosaurus closely resembled that of
Ichthyosaurus, which at the time had only been found in European
limestone dated to the
Early Jurassic such as the quarries of
Lyme Regis, deposits which the Joggins Formation predates by more than 100 million years. Vertebrate palaeontologists Donald Baird,
Alfred Romer, and
Robert L. Carroll have suggested that Marsh's
Eosaurus actually represents fossils of
Ichthyosaurus which Marsh purchased off someone who claimed they had been found at Joggins and then passed the find off as his own discovery. Based on
bivalve fossils recovered from the Joggins Formation,
Joseph Frederick Whiteaves described
Asthenodonta in 1893, but the genus was redescribed later that year by Thomas Chesmer Weston, who renamed it
Archanodon.
George Frederick Matthew, a pioneer in the field of
ichnology also took an interest in Joggins and published his observations on tetrapod trackways recovered from the site in 1903.
Walter A. Bell began researching the Joggins Formation in 1911, almost immediately after his graduation from
Yale University. Bell was one of Canada's delegates at
International Geological Congress's twelfth meeting in 1913, and accompanied the other delegates on a tour and dinner at the Joggins Cliffs that year. In 1914, Bell conducted the first detailed study of
macrofloral fossils across Nova Scotia's Carboniferous formations, including the
Mabou Group and
Cumberland Group; as part of this study Bell assigned Divisions III, IV, and V (and part of Division II) to the "Joggins Formation", the first use of the name. The number of workers in Joggins steadily increased with production, but as Nova Scotia
deindustrialised and other mines shut down the percentage of Cumberland County miners employed at Joggins increased from 21% in the 1880s to 25% in the 1900s and 43% in the 1910s. The
Provincial Workmen's Association (PWA) established an early foothold in Joggins, first with Brunswick Lodge and later with Holdfast Lodge. Brunswick Lodge was the first to represent Joggins Mine workers. In 1884 the
union attempted to negotiate with their employer at the time, prompting the manager - known in contemporary accounts as "Mr. B." - to remove his gloves and threaten to beat every worker. The company withdrew from negotiations and offered workers $10.00 each to abandon the union and come back to work. The
strike went on, and when one miner attempted to retrieve his wages from Mr. B. the manager threw a piece of
cast iron at him. The miner retaliated by throwing the iron back at Mr. B., striking him in the head but causing no severe injuries. Despite the clear belligerence between the company and the workers, strikers eventually began to
cross the picket line and Brunswick Lodge dissolved that year. '' caricature of William Stevens Fielding, 1909 By 1895, Holdfast Lodge represented 20% of Joggins Mine's workers, the largest union in mainland Nova Scotia at the time. The politics of Holdfast Lodge were considered radical even by the standards of other Provincial Miner Workers chapters in Nova Scotia. 15 of the 19 PMW strikes that were held in the 1890s happened in Cumberland County, and Holdfast Lodge organized three in 1895 alone. Robert Drummond, Grand Secretary of the PMW, was particularly annoyed by their negotiations and tactics, their membership being largely uneducated and militant. Amid the threat of a wage reduction in the winter of 1895–96, Holdfast Lodge ordered all Joggins Mine workers to strike despite being ordered by Drummond not to, and in mid-March 1896 an estimated 200 members of Holdfast Lodge barricaded themselves inside the local PWA meeting hall to resist arrest, arming themselves with bricks, a number of assorted
small arms, and 27
rifles. Nonetheless,
Premier William Stevens Fielding engaged with Holdfast Lodge in order to build a loyal and powerful voter base. Fielding was leader of the
Anti-Confederation Party and had been elected on a promise to remove Nova Scotia from
Confederation, and when he failed to fulfill this promise he refocused his efforts on expanding the province's coal industry instead. One of Fielding's unconventional tactics involved working with the PWA to improve workers' access to education. The federal
Liberal Party also campaigned hard for the PWA, as
Cumberland had long been a
Conservative Party stronghold: Cumberland had only ever been represented by Conservative
Members of Parliament since Confederation and in nine elections had supported
Charles Tupper, who was leading the Conservatives in 1896. Support from Holdfast Lodge managed to turn Cumberland in favour of the Liberals, and
Hance James Logan was elected to the Parliament on
23 June 1896. The PWA succeeded in part because of their support for the community's
funerary traditions, shutting down facilities like the Joggins Mine following a death and not returning to work until the deceased worker was put to rest. Such elaborate traditions had once been commonplace, but were mostly abandoned by the turn of the century until revived with the protection offered by unions. In 1898 the manager of Joggins Mine insisted the workers send a delegation to the funeral rather than shut down the mine for a day to attend; this request was ignored. In 1906, a funeral procession consisting of all the miners in Joggins marched from town to the
Maccan River Bridge. The PWA came into conflict not just with mine managers, but also with the
United Mine Workers, which had been founded in the United States in 1890. The PWA and the provincial United Mine Workers organization united in 1917 to form the Amalgamated Mine Workers of Nova Scotia, which was assimilated into the UMW in 1918.
Child labour As was the case with many of Nova Scotia's mining operations, the coal mines at Joggins employed
child labour when possible. Following the deaths of 70 miners and a single boy in the
Drummond Mine explosion on 13 May 1873 in
Westville, miners in Joggins adopted a rule of allowing children working in the mines to be the first to leave at the end of the day. While children were paid less than their adult colleagues, their income was indispensable to mining families which were typically impoverished. Class disparity became obvious with the advent of education as a status symbol, poor children often abandoning school early in life to work the mines. In August 1905 a number of child miners at Joggins left work on a recreational
strike when they left work to play a game of baseball. Ideas surrounding childhood began to shift in the mid-19th century. The Mines Act of 1873 prohibited anyone under the age of 10 from working in any Nova Scotian mine, and in 1891 the minimum age of miners was raised to 12. In 1908 legislation banned the employment of any child miner who had not completed a
grade seven education. Nova Scotia adopted the Free Schools Act in 1864 to provide public funding for schools which agreed to follow provincial standards of education, and in 1883 public school boards were given the right to fine parents of children aged 7–12 if their child did not attend at least 80 days of school per year. Nova Scotia finally enforced province-wide compulsory attendance for children aged 7–14 in 1921. In 1923 the Mines Act was amended to ban children from coal mines altogether, raising the school-leaving age to 16 and prohibiting anyone below that age from working in a mine.
Don Reid and the Joggins Fossil Centre Donald R. "Don" Reid (1922–2016) was born on 29 May 1922 in Joggins, Nova Scotia. Reid's family was involved in the Joggins Mine, around which Joggins's economy was based, and as a teenager he was forced to leave school when his father sustained an injury in the mine and could no longer work. During this time Reid developed an interest in the Joggins Formation's abundance of fossils, collecting and studying them despite having no formal training as a
palaeontologist. Don Reid was not the only person taking an interest in the site, and in 1972 a 1.6 km (1 mi) section of the Joggins Cliffs were protected under the Historical Objects Protection Act, which was repealed and replaced with the Special Places' Protection Act in 1980 and prohibited
fossil collecting from Joggins or anywhere else in Nova Scotia without a permit. Though the risk of fossil poaching was not high in Joggins, the legislation ensured Reid remained one of only a handful of people authorized to research the cliffs. The Reid family opened a visitor centre on their property in 1989 to exhibit the vast collection, spurring the creation of the Joggins Fossil Centre at Coal Mine Point in Spring 1993. Reid and his assistant often gave personal tours of the Joggins Cliffs, and the Reid family claims that the Joggins Fossil Centre hosted visitors from more than 44 countries. Reid acquired the nickname "Keeper of the Cliffs" from the Joggins community during this period. Reid was instrumental in having
UNESCO declare the
Joggins Fossil Cliffs a
World Heritage Site, which occurred on 7 July 2008. A number of institutions and societies honoured Don Reid for his contributions to palaeontology, particularly in the latter years of his life. In 2013, the
Atlantic Geoscience Society granted Reid the Laing Ferguson Distinguished Service Award, and in 2016 Reid was inducted into the
Order of Nova Scotia. In 2015, researchers announced that a new
ichnofossil - a tetrapod trackway found in several formations of the
Cumberland Group including the Joggins Formation - would be named in honour of Reid when the species was formally described. The trackway consists of footprints wide, and likely represent the Joggins Formation's largest tetrapod and top predator (possibly
Baphetes).
Recent history The Joggins Formation, which had been treated only as a
member of the Cumberland Group since 1944, was formally reclassified as its own
formation in 1991. The new classification used the measurements of William Logan's 1843 survey and contained Divisions IV and V, as well as the base of Division III. While the decision to define this section as a distinct formation has been upheld in later studies, the exact boundaries of the Joggins Formation have been debated. In 2005, the Joggins Formation was reformulated to consist of only Division IV and the limestone base of Division III. A bronze plaque was erected in Joggins in May 1992 to commemorate the 150-year anniversary of the Geological Survey of Canada's inception. The plaque is dedicated to the work of
Sir William Logan. An international team of geologists remeasured the Joggins Formation in 2005, the first time such a procedure had been done since Charles Lyell and John W. Dawson's survey in 1853. To celebrate ten years as a UNESCO heritage site, the Joggins Fossil Institute hosted the first Joggins Research Symposium on 22 September 2018. A number of improvements were suggested to improve the site for research and educational purposes, including the construction of a storage facility for fossil lycopsids recovered from the cliffs which could bear tetrapod fossils, the development of
machine learning software to better identify fossils at the site, and revision of the
Special Places Protection Act. == Geology ==