When Lynn Lee heard the mine was closing, it brought back the pain and anger of 17 years ago, when the lifeless body of her husband Bruce was pulled from the pit.
When Russell Critch heard the news, he wondered where he could ever find a new job at age 53, after working underground for 31 years.
And me? My memory tumbled back 55 years, to the day when my parents were terrified that I had fallen into one of the old mine holes that dotted the fields around our family farm in east Central Ontario.
When a mine closes in any community, it unleashes a torrent of complex emotions, both tragic and trivial. When that business is 114 years old, one of the oldest operating mines in North America - as the Madoc talc mine was - the shutdown touches almost every household in the area.
In its heyday, the Madoc mine, 220 kilometres east of Toronto, was a source of huge pride, the largest talc mine in the British Empire. It was never a massive employer, but provided a livelihood for many families, often fathers and sons working side by side. It was one of the last tangible links to a glorious mining past in the area, dating back to 1867 when the nearby hamlet of Eldorado was the site of Ontario's first gold rush.
Since opening in 1896, the talc mine has passed through a series of owners, moving from local entrepreneurs to distant multinational companies. The current proprietor, mining giant Sherritt International Corp., announced it will close the operation by the end of August, putting 47 people in the mine and nearby processing plant out of work.
The shutdown reprises a story told over and over in rural and Northern Canada, as mines evolve from get-rich-quick schemes into reliable employers and solid earners, and finally dissolve to sad endings when the mineral vein thins out.
Talc is a soft white rock, chemically known as hydrous magnesium silicate, which in its most fragile state can crumble instantly in your hands. It seems too delicate to inspire an industrial production process full of grit and muck - or to be the underpinning of a local economy.
Canada Talc, as the mine was known, did not produce high-end powder for babies' bums. Indeed, talc is increasingly replaced by corn starch for cosmetic uses. Instead, the Madoc mine's mandate was to turn out a high-volume, low-grade industrial product that served as a filler and extender for making paint, plastics and ceramics.
Today, as with many low-margin products, China is producing a growing percentage of global talc supplies, accounting for about a third of total production - and at much lower cost.
Mine general manager Bruce Lambert said by e-mail that Canada Talc had not been profitable in any of the three years Sherritt had owned it, and could see no hope of making money in the foreseeable future.
"I just wondered how they kept it going so long," said Bob Kirkwood, the mine manager for many years but now retired. He said the business badly needed an investment in infrastructure to be cost-competitive again. Then again, he said, most mines don't last any longer than 25 to 30 years - and this one endured more than a century.
With the end of mining in Madoc, it is hard to imagine the 1880s-1890s, when this area was caught up in prospecting fever. The area was rife with adventurers dreaming of silver, gold and copper strikes. They happened upon a rich localized deposit of a flaky carbonate rock called talc, which was in rare supply.
Members of my family were among those seized by delusions of riches. In the early 20th century, my great-uncle Chesley Pitts tirelessly explored for minerals in the property west of our family farm. He and a partner came up with a vein of silicate close to the existing operating mine. According to family lore, he sold his stake for cash to buy another property, benefiting little from the second talc mine that eventually grew from his discovery.
In 1914 my grandfather, Arthur, sensing the chance to make a killing, sold exploration rights on our farm to a Chicago-based mine promoter named Harry Hungerford. The cost was $100 for 10 months of exploration, with an option to renew. It did not make my grandfather wealthy, either. Holes were dug in a number of places, but they never yielded an operating mine.
Meanwhile, the two existing mines, called the Conley and Henderson mines, merged in the 1930s, and the combined entity, Canada Talc, kept chugging along for another seven decades.
The mine remained a constant presence in our lives. My parents always feared I would climb over a wire fence and fall into the abyss of one of the shafts. One afternoon, as an eight-year-old, I led a band of friends into the woods without telling our parents. They gathered up a search party, and when my group finally emerged, searchers were hovering over one of the holes, looking for signs of life.
We were, in fact, in much less danger than the men who worked at the mine. There were health issues associated with breathing in silicate dust. I knew a family on our rural route where the bread-winner was dying of lung disease. By the time Russell Critch joined Canada Talc in the 1970s, dust masks were part of the equipment.
More recently, industrial accidents at the mine made headlines. Bruce Lee was 39 when he died in the mine in 1993, leaving his wife, Lynn, and a seven-year-old daughter. "You still miss that person every day," said Ms. Lee.
In 2008, 22-year-old Justin Rogers smothered to death in a flood of broken rock, sediment and water, technically known as muck. Sherritt pleaded guilty to not taking reasonable safety precautions to protect Mr. Rogers, and was fined $285,000. The Rogers family is reluctant to talk about it, a relative said, adding that "they are still grieving."
The talc mine's fate was probably sealed in 2007, when Sherritt bought the assets of Dynatec Corp., of Richmond Hill, Ont. The major prize was a 40-per-cent interest in a nickel deposit in Madagascar. An ancient talc mine in Eastern Ontario happened to come with the package.
According to Mr. Critch, it was getting harder and harder to get at the ore. In recent years, the rock was extracted from a 240-metre shaft through a hand-off system of scoops, trucks and ramps, before being transported to a mill 15 kilometres away for grinding and packaging.
He admits, after 31 years, that he is out of practice to hunt for a job. He is more hopeful for his 25-year-old son, who also worked at the talc mine and might look for employment in Ontario's northland, where there are still mines.
Ms. Lee's daughter is now 24, and was recently married, without a father to give her away. Ms. Lee recalls her husband was always positive about what the talc mine meant to the town. "Bruce used to say it fed a lot of families, but he ended up dying down there."