Work Through Time: Cape Breton Stories of Land & Sea

Marble Mountain, 1926. J.P. Messervey. 80-580-4760. Beaton Institute, Cape Breton University.

This spring when many people learned that the County Festival of the Arts would be in Marble Mountain, faces looked on somewhat blankly. "Marble Mountain?" they asked, "Where's that?"

How fast people forget. Today, Marble Mountain is a hamlet of approximately forty people, nestled on a breathtakingly beautiful corner of West Bay, between Port Hawkesbury and Whycocomagh, eighteen miles west of Orangedale. A ghost town, with an empty, rambling, five storey general store, a beach formed entirely of marble chips, and, hidden among the trees and bushes, concrete bulkheads, railroad beds, and tunnel mouths that stand as a testament a time, three-quarters of a century ago, when Marble Mountain was the busiest industrial center on the Bras d'Or.

Each spring, from 1870 to 1921, more than seven hundred men migrated to Marble Mountain to live in boarding houses and tarpaper shacks clustered around a quarry that produced fine structural marble, dolomite, and limestone sold all over Eastern North America. The general store, MacLachlan and Saunders, boasted marble-top counters and shining brass rails. Bras d'Or Lime and Marble Company had machine shops, power houses, a forge, rock crushers, a cooper’s shop, and a trestle loading pier. The workers, mostly new immigrants, came from so many different countries that the company employed an interpreter versed in seven languages.

It took forty horses to haul the stone from the quarry to the wharf, and farmers for miles around earned an income raising vegetables, meat, and fruit for the workers and hay and oats for the horses.

In 1902, the quarry was sold to the Dominion Steel and Coal Company, DOSCO, which drew on it for limestone for smelting iron. The workers switched from cutting marble blocks to blasting limestone, and work continued.

It all vanished almost overnight. In the spring of 1921, just before regular opening time, DOSCO announced that it had found a cheaper source of limestone at Port au Port, Newfoundland, a quarry whose wharf didn’t ice in the winter. The company dismantled the heavy machinery, the boarding houses closed, the farmers turned their extra acres into pasture, and the seven hundred men stayed at home. The Royal Bank closed, the minister was called to another charge, abandoned rails and machinery rusted and the quarry tunnels collapsed and filled in.

This account of the busy days of Marble Mountain originally appeared in The Inverness County Participaper in June 1984, published by the Inverness County Department of Recreation and Tourism.

© 1979-2009 Inverness County Department of Recreation and Tourism