In the 1870s, the Drummond Mine in Westville, Pictou County, was the most important coal operation in the country. But the mine had a persistent problem that no amount of prestige could mask: small fires kept erupting in the coal seams. The standard method for dealing with them, a controlled gunpowder ignition followed by dousing with water, was crude but usually effective. It was the kind of routine hazard that miners lived with because the alternative was not mining at all. The mine had also recently reopened following a labor strike, and during the idle period, foul air had accumulated in the tunnels. Firedamp, primarily methane, mixed with coal dust in concentrations that turned the mine into something closer to a loaded weapon than a workplace.

The first explosion killed and wounded many underground, including manager James Dunn, who had gone down to assess the fire himself. On the surface, surviving miners gathered to discuss a rescue attempt. They were still talking when the second explosion hit. This one was catastrophic. Eyewitnesses described it as volcanic in force: towers of flame erupted from every mine entrance, hurling timber, rock, and human bodies into the open air. The blast was powerful enough to reopen the sealed Campbell Workings, a closed older mine connected to the Drummond tunnels. More explosions followed the second, each feeding on the coal dust stirred up by the one before. The mine had become a self-sustaining engine of destruction.

There would be no rescue. The fires burned for five days while crews worked desperately to contain them, diverting streams into every opening and then packing the entrances with gravel, clay, and debris. It was grim, methodical work, carried out with the knowledge that anyone still alive underground was being sealed in along with the dead. Seventy men perished, either killed outright by the explosions or entombed when the mine was filled. The New York Times covered the disaster on May 15, reporting flames reaching a hundred feet high and no hope for the trapped miners. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper published engravings of the scene, bringing the horror of the second explosion to readers across North America.

The precise cause was never determined with certainty, but a firedamp explosion triggering a larger coal dust explosion remains the most likely sequence. The Drummond disaster was one of many that would mark Pictou County's coal mining history over the following century, a grim lineage that runs through the Foord Pit, the Allan Shaft, and eventually to the Westray Mine explosion of 1992. The Nova Scotia Museum of Industry in nearby Stellarton now stands on land that includes some of the oldest industrial sites in the province, including the Foord Pit itself. Coal built Pictou County. It also buried its sons in the dark, again and again, and the Drummond Mine was where that pattern first announced itself on a national scale.