Canada’s University of Waterloo Recreates Old Mining Tunnel on Campus
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Peter Russell, curator of the Earth Sciences Museum at the University of Waterloo.
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Peter Russell stands in a simulated mining tunnel beside a mining drill.
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Peter Russell looks like a man who has hit the motherlode.
Stepping into a new exhibit in the Earth Sciences Museum at University of Waterloo, Russell, the museum’s curator, could well be a miner heading underground to seek silver.
The exhibit is a replica of a mining tunnel in Cobalt, the Ontario community where silver was discovered in 1903.
The discovery made Cobalt, 140 kilometres north of North Bay, an overnight boom town. In 1906, police in New York City were called to “clear a street of people who were frantically trying to buy Cobalt mining shares from curbside brokers,” says a poster produced for the exhibit.
Today, there are no active mines in Cobalt.
But a UW passageway — about 24 metres long and regularly used by students hurrying from the earth sciences/chemistry building to the environmental and information technology building — now has the feel of a historic mining tunnel.
The presence of some original track, an ore cart, a mucking machine and some drills add to the mood.
“It transports you back in time to the 1950s,” Russell says. “I want to give kids the same excitement I’ve got in mining. We just buy an object and we don’t realize all the different things that it takes to make it.”
A typical computer game, Russell notes, contains silicon, gold and other materials that come from mines.
Russell’s mining tunnel exhibit isn’t quite finished. Still to be installed is an interactive explosives simulation with LED lights and a mining plunger — one that reminds Russell of cartoon character Wile E. Coyote’s efforts to blast Road Runner.
But the tunnel itself is ready. A rubber mould was taken of a mine wall in Cobalt to create the UW tunnel’s shape.
“It’s got the feel of the breaks in the rock,” Russell says.
When the exhibit is all done, there will be lockers just outside the tunnel where miners would have kept their hard hats and gear. And a geologist’s office will have windows looking out at what will look like Cobalt’s Right-of-Way mine, which produced about three million ounces of silver before it closed in 1958.
There will be movies and other displays showing Cobalt’s fascinating history.
“At the time, it was more famous than Toronto,” Russell says. “They used to say, ‘Toronto . . . Isn’t that where you catch the train to go to Cobalt?’”
Besides learning about mine exploration and extraction, Russell wants students to learn about the environmental impact of mines and about today’s efforts to reduce that impact. UW researchers are looking into topics like mine remediation, he says.
To produce the mine tunnel replica, Russell has been working with the Cobalt Historical Society and with a UW alumna who helped arrange the museum’s acquisition of mining equipment while she was on a work term in Cobalt.
The project, funded entirely by donations from UW alumni and others, is close to his heart. At the Earth Sciences Museum, working among the gem, mineral, fossil and rock collections he has helped to gather, Russell is clearly in his element.
Moving from display case to display case, Russell, 67, easily relates the story of one stone after another — perhaps about the person who donated it, or perhaps about his own race to purchase the prize from under the nose of another collector.
“I saw this piece and I knew I had to have it,” he says. “It’s fun.”
He relates the stories with an enthusiasm that hasn’t diminished since he was a boy in Leeds, England, carrying a carbide lamp to explore a lead mine at Troller’s Gill in the Yorkshire Dales.
“I got keen on mining there,” he says. “I looked for fluorite and minerals.”
He remembers the sound of miners walking home with clogs on their feet, their faces blackened with coal dust. He remembers a time when pollution from coal burning was so bad that conductors would walk beside a bus to locate the edge of the road for the driver.
When he was a boy, Russell’s father, an amateur naturalist and birdwatcher, tried to interest him in collecting butterflies, but Russell hated the thought of mounting them.
While the local naturalist club was looking for flowers and insects, he would be chasing fossils of shells and coral in the Yorkshire Dales.
“Mines were all around,” he says. “There were open pits and we’d go fossil collecting at Robin Hood quarry near Leeds.”
He joined the geological society at 13 and went on collecting trips to the Isle of Skye and Isle of Eigg in Scotland.
At 15, he became a geological technician apprentice after starting work at the University of Leeds in the geology department. He studied for the City and Guilds of London chemistry techniques courses and geological techniques courses.
In 1967, lugging a box of rocks and geology books, he arrived in Canada and joined UW as a technician in the earth sciences department. He became museum curator in the early 1970s.
Today, Russell enjoys getting young people excited about earth sciences. He likes the thrill of the hunt while he scouts around for new pieces to add to the museum collection. He collects mining stock certificates and old geology books for himself.
Recently, he was in Britain for a family holiday and visited some of the old mines that so captivated him as a boy.
—By Barbara Aggerholm, The Record
To stop by the Earth Sciences Museum at University of Waterloo’s website, CLICK HERE
