Alberta Coal Branch tales
Long before oil and natural gas were discovered, coal was essential across the Prairies for heating, lighting, and cooking. Alberta’s abundant coal reserves led to the development of mines throughout the province. While the Drumheller seam in south central Alberta was a major source, the richest area was the eastern slopes, known as the Coal Branch. Dozens of small mining communities emerged almost overnight to supply an energy hungry province with the coal it depended on.
Like workers drawn by Alberta’s many oil booms, miners came to the province seeking well-paying jobs in its rich coal seams. The rise of the first miners’ unions brought a measure of security and stability, allowing families to put down roots even as miners laboured in thick coal dust, a hazard that, for many, later led to black lung disease.
By 1956, as oil and natural gas increasingly replaced coal, these communities on Alberta’s frontier had become ghost towns. Mining companies quickly evicted residents from company housing, bulldozed the once-thriving towns, and forced miners to move on.
Today, only Cadomin, named for Canadian Dominion Mines, survives because of the limestone quarry used to make cement. The rest lies beneath mountains of tailings and earth. Leaving only cemeteries to mark their existence.
When we were young, we had a cabin in Cadomin and later in Coalspur. Every summer, I was treated to old miners’ stories of dam breaks, mine explosions, and life in towns where the closest Law enforcement was over 70 miles away. The never ending supply of speakeasies and other assorted entertainment to suck the miners’ dollars from their pockets was only the beginning of all that was to be heard in a time long lost to the prairie history.
One tale I have always wanted to investigate surrounded the town of Mountain Park, several miles into the mountains west of Cadomin. With its population of over 1500 people, Mountain Park disappeared in a matter of days, leaving only the cemetery to mark its existence.
What I once assumed was just a pile of rubble covered in earth, with all the property left behind, became more of a curiosity and mystery about what really lies beneath the piles of dirt resting now since the fifties.
We had met an older miner who would become the foreman at the limestone quarry before his death, named Buddy Malloy, and what he told us could rewrite the history of this once prosperous town.
When the mining company shut down Mountain Park, Buddy Malloy and his father, Bob, were hired to destroy the town. But according to Buddy, the town was never demolished. Instead, they backfilled over the empty village, burying the train station, hotel, miners’ cabins, and every other building beneath layers of earth and tailings, where they remain intact to this day.
Because there was no oversight from the mining company until the final inspection, I cannot know whether the tale is true. But if it is, it is a remarkable story: a town that should no longer exist still survives beneath the coal and earth that buried it a living memorial to a time that helped shape the birth of our province.
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