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INDEX
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Abraham Gesner - A Father of Petroleum
(Part II)
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Gunplay in the Albert County Woods
Now follows a singular story of frontier skulduggery. In 1849 a burst mill dam on the Frederick Brook disclosed a huge seam of albertite. For reasons which remain unclear Gesner was slow in laying commercial claim to the deposit. However, by 1850, he
appears to have been associated with Edward Allison, a merchant and capitalist of Saint John, New Brunswick. Allison wired Gesner "do nothing until you hear from me". Gesner accordingly did nothing. When he finally did "hear from" Allison, he discovered
that the latter had leased the mining rights for himself and a William Cairns, cutting out Gesner entirely. Land and mining rights ran (and run) separately in New Brunswick. One could buy, sell, or lease either without the other. With mining rights now
held by Allison and Cairns, a week later, Gesner leased the land itself. The stage was set for confrontation.
In January of 1851, Gesner, who, by virtue of his lease, held the land, moved in to attempt mining. A party of 26 men hired by Allison and Cairns forced him off the property at gunpoint and began their own mine. Meanwhile Cairns and Allison had a bill
introduced in the New Brunswick Legislature (significantly, without the usual public notice) to incorporate the Albert Mining Company. A provision of this act expressly gave their company the right to trespass on privately held land - in other words, on
Gesner's lease. Gesner protested the bill, but in language so abrasive and ill chosen that the Lieutenant Governor demurred presenting a petition in such wording to the Law Lords in Britain. Gesner, through his lawyer, insisted that the offensive phrase
remain. The Law Lords, needless to say, declined to intervene.
A celebrated lawsuit resulted in 1852, in the Albert County court house, in which geological experts from Britain, the US and Canada gave testimony for one side or the other. The jury, as the record of the trial indicates, was "specially selected". While
I have not been able to establish from original sources on what criteria they were "specially" selected, there is a disposition to believe that being sympathetic to the New Brunswick political elite rather than to Gesner entered into it.
Coal? Or No Coal?
Much of the testimony revolved around the nature of the albertite - was it a true coal, or was it not. If is was a true coal, then it was indisputably included in Cairns' and Allison's mining lease. If not coal, it might not fall into their lease: a
chance, at least, for Gesner. Gesner contended (correctly) that the albertite was a bitumen, a solid hydrocarbon akin to asphalt. Gesner even accuses his opponents of hiring people to sail across the Bay to the coal mining village of Joggins Nova Scotia,
there to gather typical coal field fossils, which they then scattered around the Albertite mine where the visiting experts would find them. Chief among the experts marshalling evidence against Gesner was none other than his old opponent Charles T.
Jackson, now the State Assayer of Massachussetts and a leading east coast geologist.
On such evidence, the jury decided that the substance was coal. But the judge said that it didn't really matter anyway, since the Allison/Cairns lease included "other minerals" and the albertite was most assuredly a mineral, which, strictly speaking, it
is not either.
Defeated and in debt, Gesner, the fervent British North American nationalist, moved (fled is a better term) to New York. Here he continued his researches on kerosene, his public demonstrations of which which were enthusiastically reported in the
"Scientific American". He sold his his patents (by now for illuminating liquid, rather than gas) to the New York petroleum pioneer Samuel Downer, whose chemist Luther Atwood refined the kerosene further. Downer's company thus was the first to bring high
quality kerosene to a wide market. Quickly, Gesner's patent was successfully challenged by the British chemist James Young, and so became not an asset, but a liability to Downer and Co. Gesner, in effect, had nothing of value left to sell.
Half a Century of Kerosene
Commercially unsuccessful in the dawn of the petroleum age also, Gesner remained in New York as a consulting chemist, writing, and still proposing inventions. His few remaining letters from this time indicate increasing distress with the approaching Civil
War. In a long typewritten letter he applied for the professorship of natural science at Dalhousie University in Halifax. A one-line formal refusal was all the reply. Both make sad reading today. He died, in Halifax, in 1864. In 1933, the Imperial Oil
Company erected a monument over his grave in the Camp Hill Cemetery to honour his role as a petroleum pioneer. For Dr. Gesner's kerosene remained the prime product of oil refineries all worldwide for well over half a century, until the age of the
automobile brought mass demand for motor fuel.
Charles T. Jackson, whose personality the "Dictionary of Scientific Biography" describes as irritable and peremptory to the point of downright paranoia, in the later years of his life maintained publicly and vehemently that it was he himself who
had both invented the telegraph and discovered the medical use of anaesthetics. He died insane.
The albertite mine, control of which soon passed to American stockholders, continued in operation for thirty years, shipping albertite to Boston and New York as an enriching additive for coal distilled into municipal lighting gas. Thus for three decades
this controversial "mineral" from an obscure corner of New Brunswick gave light to New York and Boston. A ton of albertite cost only fifteen dollars to mine and sold for 45 dollars. One shareholder wrote that come what might, he would never part with his
shares in the Albert Mining Company, to own which was the kind of fortune which befell only once in a lifetime. Mining, it appears, was carried on with almost military precision by a company at once paternalistic and progressive. While the maintaining a
school for the miners' children and providing housing, it declined to operate a company store, instead leaving its employees free to spend their wages wherever they chose. For the time, this was highly unusual.
Records Burnt
Yet always in the background a lay hint of scandal. The story is told that on one occasion, a national holiday in the United States, but not one in Canada, the local New Brunswick shareholders took advantage of this fact to call an emergency meeting at
which they voted themselves a special dividend. For many years also the company appears to have quietly subsidized the family of one of the early leaseholders or property owners on the losing side of one lawsuit or another. And finally, when the mine was
exhausted in the early 1880's, the site was dismantled and all the company records burnt.
By now all buildings have crumbled, the talus piles of mine waste are grown over by brush and birches and the forest has reclaimed the shafts. But if you drive along that remote dirt road with an eye attuned to such things, (particularly in the spring or
fall when the leaves are down and the brush bare), you'll notice the tip piles. Good God, you think, there must have been a mine here. But why here, of all places? Whatever would they have dug here? From which point your own digging begins... and leads to
the singular story you've just read.
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Copyright, 1997 by Hans Durstling
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Hans Durstling is a freelance writer, jewellery maker and stone cutter living in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, near the zeolite, agate and amethyst collecting areas on the Bay of Fundy. His stories, reviews and commentaries have appeared in Canadian
Geographic Magazine, The European, Toronto Globe & Mail, Canadian Mineralogist, Mineralienwelt, Rock & Gem and many others. He now works primarily in corporate & industrial writing explaining complex scientific and technical products and processes to
layman readers, and writing & narrating corporate & technical videos. A considerable portion of his time is taken up with the constant battle to keep minerals and gems ("the hobby that got out of control") from taking over entirely.
Hans can be reached at sinico@nbnet.nb.ca.
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