Peter Kirkegaard was Deloro’s mine manager at the time Canadian Goldfields Ltd. was working the property. He built a home there that was later to become the Deloro Nursing Home (now torn down). He was a very serious researcher, with a good reputation with the universities and governments, and developed the process to refine white arsenic, the more profitable side of Deloro gold.

(Click here to read a more full biography)

In 1907, Canadian Goldfields Ltd. closed. Simultaneously the Deloro Mining and Reduction Co. opened, under the management of Peter Kirkegaard, refining cobalt from Cobalt, Ontario. We recently received a letter from Maggie Wilson of the Cobalt Historical Society, which included Peter Kirkegaard’s business card. She had been reviewing the collection of Albert Norton Morgan, a local lawyer around that time, when she came across the card.

She tells the following story:

“Over the last year, I've been researching and writing a book about the life of a stock promoter named Horatio Barber. He was in Cobalt in 1906 and in the goldfields of Larder Lake in 1907. He made a fortune selling shares in bogus mines. While in Larder Lake, his associates formed a gold mining company named the Larder Lake Proprietary Gold Fields Limited. Kirkegaard was on the board of directors of the company.

From our book, Airy Somethings, the Extraordinary Life of Aviation Pioneer Horatio Barber by Terry Grace and Maggie Wilson:

‘Directors of a mining company, especially a wildcat, were usually people of title or rank. Like a supermodel or sports legend endorsing a product, a recognizable name of some status attached to a mine will give the business a sense of legitimacy. The directors of LLPGF were politicians, medical military officers, manufacturers, and real estate men. Only two had mining backgrounds, and of those, one was a manager of a gold mine and the other was a stock promoter.

Of course, Kirkegaard was the only man of the bunch with any mining background.’ Whether or not he was aware of the fraudulent nature of the stock promotion, I cannot say.”

For more on mining in Deloro, Click here.