Gold mining in the Sherbrooke Gold District (Goldenville) can be divided into three separate periods; 1861-1872; 1873-1893; and 1894-1906. During the first eleven years after gold was discovered in 1861, claims were filed, companies formed and properties were consolidated. Mining properties were held both for the purposes of development as well as speculation. Between 1867-1869 (the peak period of activities in Goldenville) there were 19 companies listed in the area and 9,463.9 ounces of gold were recovered from 7,378.01 tons of crushed quartz.(1) However, by 1871 few of those 19 companies remained in operation; the Goldenville returns were dominated by only six companies. In 1872 production fell substantially. Many of the claims were taken up by the tributers, that is, individual miners and prospectors, who worked the properties for a rental fee.(2)
Throughout following twenty-year period from (73-93), mining properties continued to be worked in Goldenville, although not on the scale of the later '60s. Gold production did not return to the 1867 levels either in Goldenville or elsewhere in the provinces. The tribute system predominated in the gold fields of Nova Scotia did much to dismay of the provincial Department of Mines. Since most tributers worked with a minimal amount of capital on a shot-term lease system, little care was given to the protection of the mine areas. Shafts were left uncovered; trenches were left to fill with water; no plans of mining activities were made or kept.(3)
In the early years of the 1890s the reports of Goldenville mining activities were filled more with concerns of local farmers losing their stock in the unprotected, abandoned shafts and trenches. At the end of this mining hiatus, Goldenville was described in the Halifax press as being virtually abandoned, and little more that "a straggling village" surrounded by an unattractive landscape of shafts and trenches and piles of waste rock.
It was not until the middle of the1890s that full scale mining operations returned to Goldenville in a substantial way. Improved mining methods, technology and information provided by the Geological Survey of Canada topographers and geologists made it appear feasible to exploit the low-grade ore that earlier had been deemed unprofitable. Canadian, as well as American, capital returned to Goldenville in 1894 to develop the abandoned leads, as well as to discover new and more profitable veins.
1W. Malconlm, Gold Fields of Nova Scotia, (1st edition, Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1912) p.236.
2Ibid, p. 229-230; N. S. Report of the Department of Mines, (hereafter cited as RDM,) 1872 (Halifax: Citizen Publishing Co., 1873) p. 22-23.
3 N. S. RDM, 1897, (Halifax: Queen's Printer, 1880) p.9; N. S. RDM, 1894, (Halifax: Queen's Printer, 1885).