Nova Scotia’s Museum of Industry
DARCY RHYNO
BY DARCY RHYNO
The Cornish Pump at the Foord Pit outside the Museum of Industry
BIGSTOCK / NEW AFRICA
Big machines, big history
I
t’s April 29, 1950, a breezy spring day in Stellarton on Nova Scotia’s north shore. You’re hanging the laundry on the clothesline with your four-year-old daughter. It’s a Saturday, so her three older brothers are off somewhere, hopefully not getting into too much mischief. Suddenly, the thing that every woman and mother in this mining town most fears happens yet again: the earth rumbles beneath your feet. For a moment, everything—even the drying laundry flapping in the breeze—seems to stop. In the next moment, everything happens at once. You exhale the breath you didn’t know you were holding. Sirens wail. Women are screaming all over the neighbourhood. Children are crying. People are running toward the Allan shaft that descends into the Foord coal seam not five minutes from your back yard. You abandon the laundry, sweep your daughter into your arms and join the rush because your husband, the father of your four children, the only family income is down there, an impossible 200 storeys underground. When you reach the shaft, the draegermen have already assembled. You set your daughter down, keeping a tight grip on her hand, and catch your breath. There is hope. These men are trained to descend into the smoky, fiery hell that is an exploded coal mine with the singular purpose of bringing to the surface the miners who survived and the remains of those who didn’t. You gather with the other women and children to watch, wait and pray. You don’t wait long. The first survivors surface in the cage of their own accord. They tell the crowd it’s completely dark down there. Men have to find their way to the shaft from more than a kilometre away where they’re working at the coalface. Fathers and sons are reunited with their weeping and much relieved wives, children and mothers. NOVA SCOTIA
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