The Union Colliery 1873-1895
Photo C163-001 courtesy of the Cumberland Museum & Archives
24 07 2007
In the heart of the Cumberland Forest is the oldest coal mine in the area: the Union Colliery Mine. Ben Nicholas, aged 86, wrote...
In 1881, the Dunsmuir Empire at Nanaimo had acquired all of the shares of the Union Coal Company to gain control of the Comox coalfield. In 1884 they had control of the Baynes Sound coalfield and in 1888, they had secured the deep-sea port of Union Bay. The Union Colliery had been idle from 1881 until 1888 when Dunsmuir started large-scale development of the Comox coalfield. The first priority was to lay the railway tracks to Union Bay. While this was in progress, they tidied up around the Union Colliery mine site and started a new mine shaft to the west of it to gain access to a more lucrative lower seam (number 2 seam) than that of the modest Union Colliery. They called this Number One Mine. The following year they started a new mine shaft to the same lower seam 3/4 mile south of Number One Mine and called it Number Two Mine.
The upper seam workings of the Union Colliery consisted of two main tunnels driven into a hillside coal seam for a distance of 500 feet. They were 300 feet apart in the same coal seam and they were joined together at their inner end by a third tunnel at right angles to each of them. This third tunnel was the initial start of a "Long wall" type of coal production, which would mine a solid pillar of coal 500,000 cubic feet in volume backwards to the entrance of the tunnels.
To obtain critical ventilation of mine workings, each of these main tunnels had to have a companion tunnel driven a few yards from it to allow an isolated route for foul air to return outside. Until its permanent closure in 1893, the lower main tunnel was driven another 100 feet and the "Long wall" cross tunnel was extended in a straight line past the upper tunnel until it broke through the hillside coal seam 1000 feet from the upper tunnel entrance and 120 feet higher in altitude. This now allowed ventilating air to enter both main tunnels and escape along the "Long wall" through its hillside exit. This also permitted natural mine ventilation with the draught of a 200-foot chimney from the lower tunnel entrance to the "Long wall" point of exit. There was no power available but the "Laws of Nature", and the critical necessity of mine ventilation had to be motivated by the draught of hot air from a coal-fired furnace located in the lower mine workings.
This Union Colliery was the only mine in the upper coal seam and did not become a producing mine because of its limited potential at this location.
For the first ten years after Dunsmuir came, the mine was locally known as "The Tunnels" or "The Chinese Tunnels" because it was worked entirely by Chinese miners with James Whyte and sons as overmen. There seems to be some confusion in this mine being called Number Three Mine, as it never officially named that.
As a tourist attraction of historical significance it is a priceless reality, which can be restored at a modest cost. It is a venture of "Pioneer Ingenuity" which succeeded with the total lack of necessary facilities. There was only a 4-mile trail to it from tidewater and, as stated before, lacking power, ventilation had to be created using the natural propensity for hot air to rise.
This is just a brief summary of the first Comox coal mine but the details could fill a book. My only credentials for submitting this is being a coal mining buff born in Cumberland: lived "Down-camp" where all the activity took place; worked underground in #5 during the "Dirty Thirties" and as an errant teenager was in this Union mine tunnel 37 years after its closure. I have lived an active physical life for 86 years and am old enough to know what factors must be in place to make a thing work – especially in coal mines. In the absence of authentic maps of the workings of this mine, the annual reports of the Chief Inspector of Mines of that period has left a well-blazed trail of development progress in that mine.
Photograph of the mine (archival photo credit number C163-001) courtesy of the Cumberland Museum and Archives. For more information on Cumberland's Historic Mines, visit the http://cumberland.museum.bc.ca/.