The Lakeside Mine was started by Mr. Dunn shortly after the C.N.R. went through here in 1910.
In 1919 the mine was sold to the McBain Brothers of Edmonton. The mine expanded to greater production, with coal cutting machines and a new system for controlling mine fires which had been an ongoing problem. Fires had driven them from the original workings. A new entry was driven to go around that mining area and it was eventually broken into from the back and the area was mined out from that way. This was in 1946 so the fires had gone out from lack of air.
The mine employed about one hundred men and mined four to five hundred tons of coal per day. This was mainly domestic sales, with fine coal and slack going to the Power Houses in Edmonton and Saskatoon.
There were a few houses on the site, mostly for the Management Staff. There was a large Cookhouse and a three-storey Bunkhouse for the single workers and those married men who lived further away.
In 1948 there were labor problems and the underground mine shut down never to re-open.
In 1948 the mine was sold to the Mannix Company of Calgary and then opened as a strip mine, this being a much more efficient way of recovering the coal. The same tipple was used, but it was greatly enlarged to handle the large volume of coal being processed due to some large industrial orders from B.C., the domestic market, and a great demand from the expanding oil field drilling which originally used coal for their boilers.
In the mid-1950's Calgary Power built their first Power Plant in this area. At first, this plant was gas-fired, but eventually changed to coal as they built new coal-fired units
The Mannix Company, called Alberta Coal, got the contract to operate the mine supplying coal to the Power Plant. As many of the customers from the Lakeside Mine site changed to other fuels, it became uneconomical to carry on, and the Lakeside Mine closed in the early 1960's. Most of the men moved to the new operation for supplying coal to the Power Plant. The old site was cleaned up, and, as you can see, there is nothing left on the old mine site, which for fifty years had been a thriving, though up and down operation.
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