Cape Breton, Nova Scotia
Sydney Mines is a community of about twelve thousand on the west shore of Sydney Harbour, on the northeastern coast of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. It sits directly across the harbour from the city of Sydney and next door to North Sydney (the ferry terminal for Newfoundland). It has not been an incorporated town since 1995, when the province rolled it into the Cape Breton Regional Municipality along with the rest of industrial Cape Breton, but locally the identity of the old town still holds.
Coal was mined here for roughly two and a half centuries. The Mi'kmaq name for the area, Klmuejuapskwe'katik, translates as "place of coal." Small-scale extraction began in the 1720s, and the General Mining Association took over the workings in 1830. The seams were unusual: they ran out under the Atlantic itself, and by the mid-twentieth century the Princess Colliery working faces were roughly five miles under the ocean floor. The last colliery closed in 1975. That closure ended an industry that had defined the town's economy, geography, and social structure since before Confederation.
On top of the coal, Sydney Mines added steel in 1902 when the Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company built its plant here. During the First World War the Cape Breton mills produced more than half of Canada's steel, and Sydney Mines was central to that output. The plant closed in the 1920s, but the steel-and-coal identity lingered — this is a town where many families can point to grandfathers who worked underground or in the mill, sometimes both.
Sydney Mines has done a real job of preserving its industrial past. The Sydney Mines Heritage Museum and the Cape Breton Fossil Centre share the former CN railway station, a 1905 building in the town core. The fossil centre holds more than 800 Carboniferous-era plant fossils, the largest such collection in Canada, drawn from the coal seams themselves. Trinity Anglican Church on Queen Street was designed by William Critchlow Harris, one of the Maritime provinces' significant Victorian architects, and holds a painting by his brother Robert Harris, who is best known for the original Fathers of Confederation portrait.
Sydney Mines today is quieter than it was. The mine buildings are gone, replaced by residential streets and a shoreline that has slowly turned back toward the water. There is a boardwalk, popular beach walks, and a First World War coastal defence site at Cranberry Head that guarded the harbour entrance a century ago. Groceries and services are shared with Sydney and North Sydney across the harbour, a five-minute drive across the causeway. This is not a fishing village on a postcard; it is a working-class industrial town living with what it used to be, and it is worth taking on those terms.