Interview with Gus Sampson conducted in Samsonville, August 21/19. Gus’ wife Ann present during interview.
Jeanette: We were talking about Willie A. Landry. He had a little house there by Morrison’s store and he worked as a pastry chef and he was a Barber as well, right.
Gus: Yeah.
Jeanette: And his wife Gertie, she babysat a lot and she did some cooking up there too, right?
Gus: I don’t know if she cooked at the cook house, but she looked after kids, the ones that were around.
Gus: She was right across from Dannie Shaw’s store. Danny Shaw had a store there. And there was a Chinese couple that had a restaurant there.
Jeanette: Yes, Tom’s Tea Room
Gus: Yes, and then just around the corner Spinner’s was there. Spinner’s had a big shop.
What Gus did at the mine
Gus: When I first went there in 52 I went to the cookhouse as a waiter and washing dishes – a cook’s helper.
Gus: I was there until the Spring of the year. The Spring of 53 then I went away on the Great Lakes.
Jeanette: But did you go down into the mine?
Gus: After, in 55. I was on the Lakes for two years and then I went back to the mine in 1955 and I went underground.
Jeanette: So, when did the mine stop running?
Gus: 56/57 - around the last of 56 the first of 57. See, a lot of the miners went to Till Cove in Newfoundland around that time. In 55 and 56 they started leaving.
Jeanette: So, the mine was still working but it was fading.
Gus It was fazed out.
Working underground
Gus: I worked with Ramsay MacLeod. We were down mucking. We used to empty the shoots out and tram the stuff to the Grisly with electric motors and cars.
Jeanette: What’s the Grizley?
Gus: The Grizley - It kind of separated some of the stuff. If the ore was too big it wouldn’t go down through the Grizley. It had to be a certain size to go into the mill to get crushed. Then they’d take the samples. They took samples, underground but they’d also take samples after it was crushed.
Jeanette: The Grizley – Would that be a crusher?
Gus: It was just a dump. If the rocks were too big, they’d have to break it so it would go down through the Grizley. If not, then it would plug up.
Jeanette: Would they break it with a hammer?
Gus: Sometimes they’d break it with a hammer. Sometimes they had to break it with Dynamite, mostly a hammer.
Jeanette: You were doing (mucking) the ore coming down the shoots. Were there others up above doing the dynamite. Do you know how they did it?
Gus: The Drillers. The drillers would drill around the holes in a drift. They’d drill and load it and blast it and then muck it out. You’d lay the track according as you were going in the drift. At the head of every drift, they used to drill a pattern of holes.
Jeanette: The head, meaning the ceiling?
Gus: Ceiling, yes and the face. If they had to go, say a hundred feet or two hundred feet to make a drift off the main line that’s where they’d go to a certain degree.
Jeanette: And then they’d start putting (drilling) the holes in and blasting and the stuff would come down.
Gus: And it would kick out and we’d muck it out with a mucking machine. I can’t remember if they had any long hole drilling there or not. I know Johnny Martell was a long hole driller, diamond driller. He used to drill to get the samples.
Jeanette: He’d get the samples from the mine.
Gus: Yeah, to a core. It was a round core about two inches in diameter.
Jeanette: Doug showed me a picture of two men from Quebec and the drill was there. I thought it was a piping system. There was a pipe coming down and a pipe coming across (the bottom)
Gus: Well they must have been long hole drilling. What they’d call deep hole, they would be about a hundred feet deep. They’d do patterns and after a while when they were finished getting the ore down to the bottom, they’d blast them out, so they’d fall. It would come down.
Jeanette: It would come down in these shoots, right?
Gus: Yeah, it would come, and they’d muck it with the muck machines and tram it out to the Grizley.
Jeanette: Would they (the drillers) go out from underground to drill holes as well.
Gus: There was places where it would be drilled from the ground down. If I’m not mistaken, I think the mine was a thousand feet deep. 700 feet was the last level.
Jeanette: That would be the farthest down you’d go?
Gus: Yeah, 700 feet.
Jeanette: And when you’d be dumping this ore, you’d be dumping it down an ore shoot?
Gus: The Grizley. And it was sent up to the surface. They had machines on the bottom of the cage and it would go up to the ground and they’d dump it. It would dump into a shoot and then go up to the mill and get crushed and then it was shipped to St. Peter’s. (See Wendel Holmes interview re working in the crusher house and the mill).
Jeanette: I think they called that a Skip.
Gus: Yes, a skip.
Jeanette: I saw some pictures online, not of the ones they used back then but of the kind they use today.
Put photo of skip in here
Gus: They’d skip the ore up.
Jeanette: Who would be the Cage Man?
Gus: He’d be in the cage but there would also be an operator (in the hoist house) who would be doing the hoisting. He’d lower you down to whatever level. It was all sent by signal.
Jeanette: And the Cage Man what was he doing?
Gus: The Cage Man - He was looking after the cage and making sure everyone got on safe and got off and that the doors closed and that and the gate closed before the cage moved.
Jeanette: That was for when they were lifting the people. I understood there were two cables.
Gus: Two cages. One for heavy equipment and one to take the men up and down. There would be a certain time of the shift, they’d be (doing) what they call skipping. They’d skip for an hour, or a half hour or maybe two hours. It depends.
Jeanette: And I think when you went down you couldn’t come back up until your shift was over, right?
Gus: Unless something happened. If you took sick, they’d take you up. There was a phone there. You could call the operator and tell him somebody got sick or somebody got hurt and that you needed the cage and then they’d stop skipping and then send the cage down.
Jeanette: Do you know Angus Alex MacLeod. He was from Framboise. He was doing mucking too.
Gus: Yes, I knew him. And Dan Morrison. He just lived outside of Stirling.
Jeanette: What did Dan do?
Gus: Dan was a Hoister. He went to Newfoundland at one point.
Gus; And old Dan MacAskill. He went to Newfoundland. He went with Atlantic Coast Copper, in Little Bay, Newfoundland. And when I went over to Newfoundland in 64…
Jeanette: Working in the mine?
Gus: Working in the mine. And the first fellow I ran into was old Dan. He was my supervisor. (Laughter)
Gus: I’ll never forget it, the time I was in Newfoundland, I said something about a hay wire. He said, “Jesus, everything is Haywire here now”. Laughter.
Jeanette: Was he from Ferguson’s Lake?
Gus: No, he was from Stirling, Old Dan. Just as you turn off to go to Framboise, in that area. It was a road to the left; It went in alongside the lake.
Jeanette: What did you do from the time the mine closed till then? I guess you worked there until it closed.
Gus: 57 I went back on the Lakes in 57 & 58. I came home in 59 and I worked with the Dept of Highways here and then I went to Newfoundland in 64 for a year.
Working at the cookhouse
Ann shows a picture of Gus stirring something in a bowl
Jeanette asks if this is something he’d do in Stirling while working at the cookhouse.
Gus: Not too much. I’d be clearing the tables, serving, scrubbing the floors. We had to scrub the dining room floor every day.
There was: myself and Cyril from St Peter’s; Florence Shaw. She worked there; George Boudreau, he was one of the Chefs there; and there was a Mombourquette, before him, from L’Ardoise. He was a Chef also. Sawyer was the other fellow who worked at the tables with me. Leo Sawyer – He was from St Peter’s. He’s away in the states now. He’s my age.
Jeanette: Now somebody who worked there for a short while told me that when they would be peeling the potatoes, there would be cockroaches everywhere and they’d have to cover the pots so some wouldn’t get in it. Did you ever notice any thing like that?
Gus: You’d see the odd cockroach, yeah.
Jeanette: Were you paid by Mindemar?
Gus: Yeah
Jeanette: How many hours would you work?
Gus: You’d work 8 hours. Sometimes you’d have a break you’d have part of the afternoon off. You’d have to be there at 4 o’clock. You might be off from 2-4.
Jeanette: Would they have meals at lunch time and supper time? What about breakfast?
Gus: Breakfast was always served. Then there was always sandwiches made and they would pack their own lunch for underground. Anyone going underground even in the day would take lunch down with them. They wouldn’t come up at noon.
Jeanette: So, they would serve lunch for the other people who worked there (on the surface). The miners would go for the breakfast and supper and then they’d grab something to go down – sandwiches...
Gus: And fruit. They’d have their own lunch can.
Jeanette: It was a busy spot. You would have been down there in the hay day when there were 500 people working there.
Gus: Yeh
Jeanette: What would the people be like who came to eat? Would they be nice to deal with?
Gus: Some were. Some weren’t.
The people from Sampsonville
Jeanette: Do you know where a lot of people lived down there (Stirling)? There was a lot from Sampsonville. I think I got that figured out - that they lived down around the lake there where Enos Sampson lived.
Gus: Enos, Martin (Sampson), Joe Pottie, Armand Labelle, from Quebec. He had a Cabin down there.
Jeanette: Carpenters?
Gus: Carpenter – Joe Carpenter.
Gus: Mitchells.
Jeanette: They were along further
Gus: They were past Enos and them.
Jeanette: Then Joe and Bella Carter
Gus: Yes, they weren’t too far from where Enos and them were.
Jeanette: They were up on a road, right
Gus: a branch off the main road. Bella and Joe were over closer to where Mitchel lived.
Jeanette: Before you got to Mitchel?
Gus: Before I think. I don’t know. We used to go over there to play cards anyway for chickens.
Jeanette: For chickens!
Gus: Yes, chickens
Jeanette: (Laughter). I guess three were a few stores there where you could buy chickens and other food and stuff like that.
Gus: Well, Morrison's store. There was a building there, right on the corner, right on the corner (coming from the mine). That’s where Frankie Boudreau used to haul stuff down from the main store (St Peter’s). He worked for Morrison's.
Other people who worked at the mine
Jeanette: The mine ran in 20’s and the 30’s and closed in 39 and then they started building it up in 49. Doug’s father Willie A (Landry) would have been down there then.
Gus: And his brother Ernest was carpenter. He worked down there.
Jeanette: Ernest Landry, yeah. Ernest did some contracting.
Gus: And Enos (Sampson) worked, after he lost his arm, as one of the guards at the guard house.
Jeanette: Did he lose his arm while he was working there?
Gus: I’m not sure if he was working there and he was on his days off, but he lost his arm in Loch Lomond. He fell out of his brother’s truck.
Jeanette: That’s what Irene said. You think it was around the time he was working in Stirling?
Gus: Yeah
Gus: John Burke’s wife
Jeanette: Marie
Gus: Well her father he was a guard there.
Jeanette: Big Jim MacDonald
Gus: Big Jim MacDonald.
Jeanette: That little guard house - That wasn’t built until 51 or so. We have some pictures where the guard house isn’t there.
Gus: I know it was just inside the gate.
Jeanette: There was a little building there.
Gus: The bunk houses were up (on the hill). There were three bunkhouses.
Gus: Old Barnaby Sampson from lower L’Ardoise was Janitor at the bunkhouses.
Jeanette: So, there were two big bunkhouses and a cook house but there were three old bunkhouses
Gus: Yeah
Jeanette: There a little bunkhouse across from the big bunkhouses
Gus: Yeah
Jeanette: And I think they used it as an overflow bunkhouse
Gus: Yeh
Jeanette: Do you remember Jim and Martin MacNeil from Soldier’s cove? They worked in the assay office. Would they be going out and getting the ore samples?
Gus: Some of them would be on samples. I think most of them were. Martin Sampson, Enos’ brother worked down there too for a little while. There was a Leonard Burke who worked in the Assay office. And there were some that worked taking the samples up to the mill. The mill was up there too. Old George Fontaine from St Peter’s. He worked as a mechanic in the Garage. Alfie Cotie worked taking Samples up to the mill.
Jeanette: Would you remember where the Assay office was, would that be in the dry house? Do you remember where the Dry House was? It was across from where you would come up from…
Gus: Underground. That’s where it was. I think the garage and the Assay office was together in that area.
Gus: Alex MacDonnell from St Peter’s, he worked there.
Jeanette: Yes, Alex and Archie right? Were they brothers?
Gus: Yes. They were from Port Hood or Inverness up that way.
Gus: He was a miner so that’s how they got to go to Stirling, when they opened up the Stirling mine. Alex and them worked up in Northern Ontario for years.
Jeanette: Yes, they were established by the time they came down here. They had nice cars. It was in the 50’s and they had brand new cars.
Trucking the ore
Gus: And Malcolm S. MacDonald from Sydney River. They used to haul the ore out. It was shipped here to St Peter’s. He had about six trucks hauling then.
Jeanette: I think the mine had two originally.
Gus: The mine had two trucks and I think there were five or six of Malcom’s.
Jeanette: I think after a few years it was just Malcolm S. taking the ore up.
Gus: Some of the truck drivers that drove material up to St Peter’s - There was Clarence MacNeil, William MacKenzie, married to Christine. Then there was Gordon Keigan from Sydney. And there were two Leonard brothers from Sydney. They drove for Malcolm. And there was a Pottie fellow from River Bourgeois, he drove. And the fellows working dumping the trucks - the fellow in charge of dumping the trucks was John Dan MacDonald’s father, John Alex MacDonald. John Alex was his name.
Jeanette: Murdock Morrison from Framboise was up there doing the checking too.
Gus: Yeah
Jeanette: They had pretty good jobs.
Gus: Yeah
Jeanette: The trucks would come up twice a day.
Gus: They’d make at least two loads a day. Sometimes three but mostly two loads.
Jeanette: I understand that a lot of the mechanical work for those trucks was done up here in St Peter’s.. Gilbert Prime…
Gus: Gilbert Prime and it was Johnson’s garage. (It was) opened then and Ted Nieford’s garage.
Jeanette: Ted Nieford had the Fina, right?
Gus: The Fina.
Jeanette: And do you remember my father’s garage (Strachan’s) down in Stirling? It was right across from the Morrison’s store. It was a Superline and then later a Fina.
Gus: Yes, and just below there the schoolhouse was there.
Gus’ thoughts about working at the mine.
Jeanette: What was your experience like when you worked there? Did you find that an interesting place to be?
Gus: It was. At first I wasn’t too fuzzy about going underground but you got used to it.
Jeanette: On your first day…?
Gus: You wouldn’t be doing too much. You’d be too busy looking around.
Jeanette: And the company, would you say they treated people pretty good.?
Gus: I think so. You got your hours. I never got short-changed in hours.
Jeanette: We were talking about Willie A. Landry. He had a little house there by Morrison’s store and he worked as a pastry chef and he was a Barber as well, right.
Gus: Yeah.
Jeanette: And his wife Gertie, she babysat a lot and she did some cooking up there too, right?
Gus: I don’t know if she cooked at the cook house, but she looked after kids, the ones that were around.
Gus: She was right across from Dannie Shaw’s store. Danny Shaw had a store there. And there was a Chinese couple that had a restaurant there.
Jeanette: Yes, Tom’s Tea Room
Gus: Yes, and then just around the corner Spinner’s was there. Spinner’s had a big shop.
What Gus did at the mine
Gus: When I first went there in 52 I went to the cookhouse as a waiter and washing dishes – a cook’s helper.
Gus: I was there until the Spring of the year. The Spring of 53 then I went away on the Great Lakes.
Jeanette: But did you go down into the mine?
Gus: After, in 55. I was on the Lakes for two years and then I went back to the mine in 1955 and I went underground.
Jeanette: So, when did the mine stop running?
Gus: 56/57 - around the last of 56 the first of 57. See, a lot of the miners went to Till Cove in Newfoundland around that time. In 55 and 56 they started leaving.
Jeanette: So, the mine was still working but it was fading.
Gus It was fazed out.
Working underground
Gus: I worked with Ramsay MacLeod. We were down mucking. We used to empty the shoots out and tram the stuff to the Grisly with electric motors and cars.
Jeanette: What’s the Grizley?
Gus: The Grizley - It kind of separated some of the stuff. If the ore was too big it wouldn’t go down through the Grizley. It had to be a certain size to go into the mill to get crushed. Then they’d take the samples. They took samples, underground but they’d also take samples after it was crushed.
Jeanette: The Grizley – Would that be a crusher?
Gus: It was just a dump. If the rocks were too big, they’d have to break it so it would go down through the Grizley. If not, then it would plug up.
Jeanette: Would they break it with a hammer?
Gus: Sometimes they’d break it with a hammer. Sometimes they had to break it with Dynamite, mostly a hammer.
Jeanette: You were doing (mucking) the ore coming down the shoots. Were there others up above doing the dynamite. Do you know how they did it?
Gus: The Drillers. The drillers would drill around the holes in a drift. They’d drill and load it and blast it and then muck it out. You’d lay the track according as you were going in the drift. At the head of every drift, they used to drill a pattern of holes.
Jeanette: The head, meaning the ceiling?
Gus: Ceiling, yes and the face. If they had to go, say a hundred feet or two hundred feet to make a drift off the main line that’s where they’d go to a certain degree.
Jeanette: And then they’d start putting (drilling) the holes in and blasting and the stuff would come down.
Gus: And it would kick out and we’d muck it out with a mucking machine. I can’t remember if they had any long hole drilling there or not. I know Johnny Martell was a long hole driller, diamond driller. He used to drill to get the samples.
Jeanette: He’d get the samples from the mine.
Gus: Yeah, to a core. It was a round core about two inches in diameter.
Jeanette: Doug showed me a picture of two men from Quebec and the drill was there. I thought it was a piping system. There was a pipe coming down and a pipe coming across (the bottom)
Gus: Well they must have been long hole drilling. What they’d call deep hole, they would be about a hundred feet deep. They’d do patterns and after a while when they were finished getting the ore down to the bottom, they’d blast them out, so they’d fall. It would come down.
Jeanette: It would come down in these shoots, right?
Gus: Yeah, it would come, and they’d muck it with the muck machines and tram it out to the Grizley.
Jeanette: Would they (the drillers) go out from underground to drill holes as well.
Gus: There was places where it would be drilled from the ground down. If I’m not mistaken, I think the mine was a thousand feet deep. 700 feet was the last level.
Jeanette: That would be the farthest down you’d go?
Gus: Yeah, 700 feet.
Jeanette: And when you’d be dumping this ore, you’d be dumping it down an ore shoot?
Gus: The Grizley. And it was sent up to the surface. They had machines on the bottom of the cage and it would go up to the ground and they’d dump it. It would dump into a shoot and then go up to the mill and get crushed and then it was shipped to St. Peter’s. (See Wendel Holmes interview re working in the crusher house and the mill).
Jeanette: I think they called that a Skip.
Gus: Yes, a skip.
Jeanette: I saw some pictures online, not of the ones they used back then but of the kind they use today.
Put photo of skip in here
Gus: They’d skip the ore up.
Jeanette: Who would be the Cage Man?
Gus: He’d be in the cage but there would also be an operator (in the hoist house) who would be doing the hoisting. He’d lower you down to whatever level. It was all sent by signal.
Jeanette: And the Cage Man what was he doing?
Gus: The Cage Man - He was looking after the cage and making sure everyone got on safe and got off and that the doors closed and that and the gate closed before the cage moved.
Jeanette: That was for when they were lifting the people. I understood there were two cables.
Gus: Two cages. One for heavy equipment and one to take the men up and down. There would be a certain time of the shift, they’d be (doing) what they call skipping. They’d skip for an hour, or a half hour or maybe two hours. It depends.
Jeanette: And I think when you went down you couldn’t come back up until your shift was over, right?
Gus: Unless something happened. If you took sick, they’d take you up. There was a phone there. You could call the operator and tell him somebody got sick or somebody got hurt and that you needed the cage and then they’d stop skipping and then send the cage down.
Jeanette: Do you know Angus Alex MacLeod. He was from Framboise. He was doing mucking too.
Gus: Yes, I knew him. And Dan Morrison. He just lived outside of Stirling.
Jeanette: What did Dan do?
Gus: Dan was a Hoister. He went to Newfoundland at one point.
Gus; And old Dan MacAskill. He went to Newfoundland. He went with Atlantic Coast Copper, in Little Bay, Newfoundland. And when I went over to Newfoundland in 64…
Jeanette: Working in the mine?
Gus: Working in the mine. And the first fellow I ran into was old Dan. He was my supervisor. (Laughter)
Gus: I’ll never forget it, the time I was in Newfoundland, I said something about a hay wire. He said, “Jesus, everything is Haywire here now”. Laughter.
Jeanette: Was he from Ferguson’s Lake?
Gus: No, he was from Stirling, Old Dan. Just as you turn off to go to Framboise, in that area. It was a road to the left; It went in alongside the lake.
Jeanette: What did you do from the time the mine closed till then? I guess you worked there until it closed.
Gus: 57 I went back on the Lakes in 57 & 58. I came home in 59 and I worked with the Dept of Highways here and then I went to Newfoundland in 64 for a year.
Working at the cookhouse
Ann shows a picture of Gus stirring something in a bowl
Jeanette asks if this is something he’d do in Stirling while working at the cookhouse.
Gus: Not too much. I’d be clearing the tables, serving, scrubbing the floors. We had to scrub the dining room floor every day.
There was: myself and Cyril from St Peter’s; Florence Shaw. She worked there; George Boudreau, he was one of the Chefs there; and there was a Mombourquette, before him, from L’Ardoise. He was a Chef also. Sawyer was the other fellow who worked at the tables with me. Leo Sawyer – He was from St Peter’s. He’s away in the states now. He’s my age.
Jeanette: Now somebody who worked there for a short while told me that when they would be peeling the potatoes, there would be cockroaches everywhere and they’d have to cover the pots so some wouldn’t get in it. Did you ever notice any thing like that?
Gus: You’d see the odd cockroach, yeah.
Jeanette: Were you paid by Mindemar?
Gus: Yeah
Jeanette: How many hours would you work?
Gus: You’d work 8 hours. Sometimes you’d have a break you’d have part of the afternoon off. You’d have to be there at 4 o’clock. You might be off from 2-4.
Jeanette: Would they have meals at lunch time and supper time? What about breakfast?
Gus: Breakfast was always served. Then there was always sandwiches made and they would pack their own lunch for underground. Anyone going underground even in the day would take lunch down with them. They wouldn’t come up at noon.
Jeanette: So, they would serve lunch for the other people who worked there (on the surface). The miners would go for the breakfast and supper and then they’d grab something to go down – sandwiches...
Gus: And fruit. They’d have their own lunch can.
Jeanette: It was a busy spot. You would have been down there in the hay day when there were 500 people working there.
Gus: Yeh
Jeanette: What would the people be like who came to eat? Would they be nice to deal with?
Gus: Some were. Some weren’t.
The people from Sampsonville
Jeanette: Do you know where a lot of people lived down there (Stirling)? There was a lot from Sampsonville. I think I got that figured out - that they lived down around the lake there where Enos Sampson lived.
Gus: Enos, Martin (Sampson), Joe Pottie, Armand Labelle, from Quebec. He had a Cabin down there.
Jeanette: Carpenters?
Gus: Carpenter – Joe Carpenter.
Gus: Mitchells.
Jeanette: They were along further
Gus: They were past Enos and them.
Jeanette: Then Joe and Bella Carter
Gus: Yes, they weren’t too far from where Enos and them were.
Jeanette: They were up on a road, right
Gus: a branch off the main road. Bella and Joe were over closer to where Mitchel lived.
Jeanette: Before you got to Mitchel?
Gus: Before I think. I don’t know. We used to go over there to play cards anyway for chickens.
Jeanette: For chickens!
Gus: Yes, chickens
Jeanette: (Laughter). I guess three were a few stores there where you could buy chickens and other food and stuff like that.
Gus: Well, Morrison's store. There was a building there, right on the corner, right on the corner (coming from the mine). That’s where Frankie Boudreau used to haul stuff down from the main store (St Peter’s). He worked for Morrison's.
Other people who worked at the mine
Jeanette: The mine ran in 20’s and the 30’s and closed in 39 and then they started building it up in 49. Doug’s father Willie A (Landry) would have been down there then.
Gus: And his brother Ernest was carpenter. He worked down there.
Jeanette: Ernest Landry, yeah. Ernest did some contracting.
Gus: And Enos (Sampson) worked, after he lost his arm, as one of the guards at the guard house.
Jeanette: Did he lose his arm while he was working there?
Gus: I’m not sure if he was working there and he was on his days off, but he lost his arm in Loch Lomond. He fell out of his brother’s truck.
Jeanette: That’s what Irene said. You think it was around the time he was working in Stirling?
Gus: Yeah
Gus: John Burke’s wife
Jeanette: Marie
Gus: Well her father he was a guard there.
Jeanette: Big Jim MacDonald
Gus: Big Jim MacDonald.
Jeanette: That little guard house - That wasn’t built until 51 or so. We have some pictures where the guard house isn’t there.
Gus: I know it was just inside the gate.
Jeanette: There was a little building there.
Gus: The bunk houses were up (on the hill). There were three bunkhouses.
Gus: Old Barnaby Sampson from lower L’Ardoise was Janitor at the bunkhouses.
Jeanette: So, there were two big bunkhouses and a cook house but there were three old bunkhouses
Gus: Yeah
Jeanette: There a little bunkhouse across from the big bunkhouses
Gus: Yeah
Jeanette: And I think they used it as an overflow bunkhouse
Gus: Yeh
Jeanette: Do you remember Jim and Martin MacNeil from Soldier’s cove? They worked in the assay office. Would they be going out and getting the ore samples?
Gus: Some of them would be on samples. I think most of them were. Martin Sampson, Enos’ brother worked down there too for a little while. There was a Leonard Burke who worked in the Assay office. And there were some that worked taking the samples up to the mill. The mill was up there too. Old George Fontaine from St Peter’s. He worked as a mechanic in the Garage. Alfie Cotie worked taking Samples up to the mill.
Jeanette: Would you remember where the Assay office was, would that be in the dry house? Do you remember where the Dry House was? It was across from where you would come up from…
Gus: Underground. That’s where it was. I think the garage and the Assay office was together in that area.
Gus: Alex MacDonnell from St Peter’s, he worked there.
Jeanette: Yes, Alex and Archie right? Were they brothers?
Gus: Yes. They were from Port Hood or Inverness up that way.
Gus: He was a miner so that’s how they got to go to Stirling, when they opened up the Stirling mine. Alex and them worked up in Northern Ontario for years.
Jeanette: Yes, they were established by the time they came down here. They had nice cars. It was in the 50’s and they had brand new cars.
Trucking the ore
Gus: And Malcolm S. MacDonald from Sydney River. They used to haul the ore out. It was shipped here to St Peter’s. He had about six trucks hauling then.
Jeanette: I think the mine had two originally.
Gus: The mine had two trucks and I think there were five or six of Malcom’s.
Jeanette: I think after a few years it was just Malcolm S. taking the ore up.
Gus: Some of the truck drivers that drove material up to St Peter’s - There was Clarence MacNeil, William MacKenzie, married to Christine. Then there was Gordon Keigan from Sydney. And there were two Leonard brothers from Sydney. They drove for Malcolm. And there was a Pottie fellow from River Bourgeois, he drove. And the fellows working dumping the trucks - the fellow in charge of dumping the trucks was John Dan MacDonald’s father, John Alex MacDonald. John Alex was his name.
Jeanette: Murdock Morrison from Framboise was up there doing the checking too.
Gus: Yeah
Jeanette: They had pretty good jobs.
Gus: Yeah
Jeanette: The trucks would come up twice a day.
Gus: They’d make at least two loads a day. Sometimes three but mostly two loads.
Jeanette: I understand that a lot of the mechanical work for those trucks was done up here in St Peter’s.. Gilbert Prime…
Gus: Gilbert Prime and it was Johnson’s garage. (It was) opened then and Ted Nieford’s garage.
Jeanette: Ted Nieford had the Fina, right?
Gus: The Fina.
Jeanette: And do you remember my father’s garage (Strachan’s) down in Stirling? It was right across from the Morrison’s store. It was a Superline and then later a Fina.
Gus: Yes, and just below there the schoolhouse was there.
Gus’ thoughts about working at the mine.
Jeanette: What was your experience like when you worked there? Did you find that an interesting place to be?
Gus: It was. At first I wasn’t too fuzzy about going underground but you got used to it.
Jeanette: On your first day…?
Gus: You wouldn’t be doing too much. You’d be too busy looking around.
Jeanette: And the company, would you say they treated people pretty good.?
Gus: I think so. You got your hours. I never got short-changed in hours.