The original open-pit enterprise eventually gave way to a submarine mining operation. This picture was taken at the opening of one of the several slopes that were dug from the Island into the great bed of ore that runs beneath the floor of Conception Bay toward the open sea. By the 1960's Bell Islanders were working more than three miles out under the ocean that had sustained their ancestors for so many generations. If you worked underground in any of the mines, you were said to work in "the pit." And, as in many other mining towns, ore was referred to as "muck." The men who blasted, dug and loaded it called themselves "muckers."
