Feb. 19, 1974: Readers taken on a tour of the last coal mine in Edmonton area
Journal readers travelled back in time with a story about the last mine of what was once a booming coal industry in the Edmonton area, and one of the last small-scale underground operations in Alberta.
Reporter Steve Hume wondered how much longer the Star-Key Mine, northeast of St. Albert, could survive in an age of natural gas and strip mining.
Willard Worthington, who followed his father into the pits and rose to become part owner and manager of the mine, acknowledged “our days are limited, that’s for sure.”
Star-Key had once had a mple reserves on its 323-hectare leasehold to produce 907 tonnes a day for 100 years, but markets were fading and its leasehold had been reduced to 120 hectares.
Hume and a photographer joined miners as they headed down a steep incline to the heart of a 2.4-metre seam of sub-bituminous ‘B’ type coal, used primarily as fuel for steam-electric power generation and as an important source of light aromatic hydrocarbons for the chemical synthesis industry.
Their guide was Harry Wales, 68, who had worked at the mine since the first coal was taken out in 1945.
He said 20 horses used to live in the mine and did the work of a rusty, battery-powered engine that was then pulling the train of ore cars about 1.6 kilometres through narrow tunnels.
Four years after the story ran, Star-Key mine closed, bringing an end to the coal mining industry in the Edmonton area that was started by the Hudson’s Bay Company as early as the 1840s.
According to local historian Lawrence Herzog in an article in the Real Estate Weekly, the first coal was mined from an area just below today’s Crowne Plaza Chateau Lacombe in 1881. Soon there were coal mines all along both sides of the river bank employing hundreds of men.
More than 95 per cent of the 13 million tonnes of coal produced in Edmonton between 1874 and 1970 came from the Clover Bar seam near modern-day Rundle Park.
Between 1881 and 1970, more than 100 mines operated along the valley — 17 of which operated into the 20th century. Some of the significant early mines operated east of today’s Dawson Bridge, in Riverdale, Mill Creek Ravine, and east of the High Level Bridge.