Around 75 people packed the visitor’s gallery at Tantramar Town Hall on Saturday to hear about the natural beauty of Sackville’s new quarry park and to learn about the Pickard Quarry’s history of producing the high-quality red sandstone used in many buildings at Mount Allison University and across eastern Canada.

“It’s a great crowd and I’m also very pleased that we have so many people in our community who are interested in the history and the future of the Pickard Quarry,” said wildlife biologist Richard Elliot as he thanked people for attending on behalf of the Tantramar Outdoor Club, the Tantramar Heritage Trust and the Chignecto Naturalists’ Club.

He explained that the Pickard family extracted huge blocks of sandstone from the quarry — at times up to 800 tons a day — from the 1880s to 1930 when it was purchased by Mt. A.

The university continued extracting stone for its campus buildings until the late 1970s when the quarry finally closed.

Sackville Freestone Company — image of an unidentified man standing near blocks of quarried stone sometime between 1900 & 1930. Photo: Mount Allison University Archives

“It’s been over 50 years since stone was taken out of that quarry and in that period, it’s really developed into what I call a naturalized wooded area and wetland,” Elliot said, adding that its network of footpaths and its ponds have been used for hiking, viewing wildlife, bird watching, swimming and skating.

“You can see in this picture,” Elliot said pointing to a slide, “my skates and the tracks of an otter on the ice on the same day…

“And anybody who went to high school here or to Mt. A. probably knows that it was a hangout for many nefarious activities,” he added, as audience members laughed.

Later, he referred to a wildlife study he and his partner Kate Bredin updated two years ago in which they found an estimated 49 bird species that nest in the quarry and about 90 species that can be seen there throughout the year. In addition, more than 20 species of mammals may frequent the area.

Aerial view of Pickard Quarry from the east showing the gravelled Quarry Lane flood control structure (bottom), Dominican Dr. & Charlotte St. (left), West Ave. (top). Photo: AN Media for Town of Tantramar

Elliot noted that in 2022, Sackville bought the quarry from Mt. A. for $1 so it could use its pond for retention of stormwater as part of its flood control system.

And then, at the urging of the outdoor club, naturalists and the heritage trust, the town agreed to help them create a wilderness park in downtown Sackville.

So far, a small parking lot has been built off Charlotte Street that leads along a gently sloping trail to a wheelchair-accessible wooden look-out over the south pond. There’s  also a nearby wooden bridge over the waterfall at Bowser Brook and plans call for a series of marked trails with guardrails and steps where they’re needed.

Elliot said there will also be several interpretive signs about the park’s natural features and quarry history.

Last year, the town spent just over $42,000 of the $65,000 capital budget allocated for the project. It has also received a $38,500 contribution from the province and another $25,000 from Medavie Blue Cross.

“We’ve got about a thousand metres or one kilometre of trails in there now,” Elliot said, “so it’s not a big long hiking area, it’s a meander kind of place, but the topography there ranges from pretty flat to very rugged…I would encourage people to keep in mind this is a work in progress.”

Quarry history

Paul Bogaard of Tantramar Heritage Trust showed slides tracing the history of the Pickard Quarry as a well-equipped industrial site that extracted red sandstone blocks from the 50-acre farm that Thomas Pickard had bought from the Bowser family in 1869, the same year he resigned as a mathematics professor at Mt. A.

Bogaard’s detective work suggests that the quarry’s sandstone was used to build Mt. A.’s first stone building in 1883 appropriately called Stone College, but later renamed Centennial Hall.

Unfortunately, construction records were destroyed when it burned in 1933.

Today, the rebuilt Centennial Hall houses the university’s senior administrative staff.

Centennial Hall in May 1887 with students posed in front. Photo: Mount Allison University Archives

Bogaard has written an extensive history of the quarry for the November 2024 issue of The White Fence, the newsletter of Tantramar Heritage Trust.

It lists several other Mt. A. buildings constructed out of Pickard Quarry stone including Hart Hall (1909), the now demolished Memorial Library (1926) and the New Science Building (1931) that is now known as the Flemington Building.

The New Science Bldg., now known as the Flemington Building around the 1930s. Photo: Mount Allison University Archives

In the years before concrete became a prevalent building material, high-quality Pickard Quarry sandstone was used in many buildings in eastern Canada such as Customs Houses in Halifax and several in Ontario including in Waterloo, Hamilton, London, Chatham and Fort William (now Thunder Bay).

The Dominion Observatory in Ottawa and the new wing of the Ontario Legislative building in Toronto were both made of Sackville sandstone as was the Bank of Nova Scotia in Truro, the old Royal Bank in Sackville, the Bank of Montreal in Moncton and the People’s Bank in Fredericton.

Bogaard said much of the credit goes to Charles Pickard who has been described as a “shrewd businessman.”

“He was lucky enough to have very high-quality stone,” Bogaard said.

“The sandstone was very even. It did not have imperfections. The thousandth block looked like the first block, so an architect could count on what it was going to look like aesthetically [and] the strength of it was unusual,” he added.

Bogaard also mentioned Pickard’s investment in powerhouses with steam boilers and electric dynamos to drive stone saws and drills and to power the pumps that kept water from filling excavation sites.

He showed a slide of four derricks, one of them 82 feet high, supporting cranes able to lift blocks of stone weighing up to 30 tons.

He added that Pickard cut costs by hauling stone by rail to Cape Tormentine where it was loaded onto boats for the journey through the Gulf and up the St. Lawrence River and into the Great Lakes.

“All the way through Ontario, from west to east, and in Montreal, and elsewhere in the Maritimes — Halifax, Saint John, Moncton, as well as Mt. A.,” Bogaard said.

“It was those investments that made them compete.”

Paul Bogaard (L) & Richard Elliot preparing to talk about the past and future of Sackville’s Pickard Quarry

To read more about the Pickard Quarry from Tantramar Heritage Trust, click here.