ABSTRACT
In 1933, a New York entrepreneur offered the people of St. Lawrence, a remote community on the south coast of the island of Newfoundland, an opportunity to escape the economic hardship that accompanied the Great Depression and the recent collapse of the cod fishery by establishing an industry to mine the veins of fluorspar buried in the barren hills around the town. Over the ensuing years, many men from St. Lawrence and neighboring communities were lured to work in the mines by the promise of a steady paycheck. Fifty years after the first mine was opened, nearly 200 of them were dead from industrial diseases such as lung cancer and silicosis.
