Eastern Acadia was captured by Great Britain in the War of the Spanish Succession and became the colony of Nova Scotia; the territory was formally ceded by France in 1713's Peace of Utrecht.

Rather than load ships on-site, Cope had the coal transported by small boats from Joggins to a wharf at the mouth of Gran’choggin (present-day Downing Cove), a creek 11.3 km (7.0 mi) north of the mine.

The land grant also stipulated that Cope pay a tax of one shilling and sixpence for every chaldron mined, send coal to Annapolis Royal to support military fortifications there, and begin construction of a town that would be named "Williamstown".

[3] Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Lawrence Armstrong was insistent on having the area colonized by British settlers as it would secure their dominance in the region, which was still largely populated by the Mi'kmaq and Acadians.

The article commented on the abundance of coal in the Bay of Fundy, referenced Henry Cope's failed mining project, and assured readers that "a better use will, doubtless, be made of this treasure, when Nova Scotia itself comes to be inhabited".

Ironically, George III did not ask that coal be included in the 1788 lease drawn up for his son Prince Frederick, which would have granted the Duke of York the mineral rights to all of Nova Scotia had it been put into effect.

[4] It is unknown why the lease was not put into effect, though historians James Stewart Martell and Delphin Andrew Muise have suggested, respectively, that either the documents were lost or the value of Nova Scotian minerals was found to be disappointingly low.

According to the new terms, this granted the Duke mining rights to the following for the next sixty years: ...gold and silver, coal, iron, stone, lime-stone, slate-stone, slate-rock, tin, copper, lead and all other mines, minerals and ores and all beds and seams of gold, silver, coal, iron, stone, lime-stone, slate-stone, slate-rock, tin, clay, copper, lead and ores of every kind and description belonging to his Majesty within the Province of Nova Scotia...[4]Once the lease was issued, the Duke subletted it to Rundell, Bridge & Co. in exchange for 25% of all profits they generated off the minerals it covered.

Abraham Gesner returned to Nova Scotia in 1844 to petition the House of Assembly for the rights to mine at Joggins, as he felt the coal reserves had gone unused for too long and a shortage of firewood in Cumberland County provided ample opportunity for a new source of fuel.

Dendrochronological studies done on wood recovered from the site suggest that miners reused materials from earlier structures to construct the New Mine, as the lumber was determined to have been cut as early as 1849.

On 22 June 1877, the Great Saint John Fire destroyed 1,612 structures and killed 19 people, ravaging the city's coal market and heavily impacting the JCMC's sales.

The Springhill and Parrsboro Coal and Rail Company, founded in 1872, acquired the General Mining Association's Cumberland County mineral rights in 1879,[6] ending the GMA's involvement in Joggins.

[3] Lyell at this time was famous for publishing his Principles of Geology (1830–1833), which popularized uniformitarianism, and was persuaded to visit Joggins after reading Gesner's 1836 observations of the cliffs and 1829 report by Brown and Smith.

Based on these earlier studies, Lyell believed the cliffs represented multiple forests that had grown on the same site, being flooded and buried in succession many times, and that their fossilization was related to the formation of coal.

On this expedition, Gesner noted the ruins of an abandoned fort which had partly collapsed with the eroding of the cliffside, a remnant of Major Henry Cope's attempt to restart his mining operation in 1733.

Logan had earlier completed two private surveys of the Nova Scotian coast in 1840 and 1841, both times searching for evidence the in situ theory applied to coal deposits other than the one he'd studied.

After completing this brief survey, Logan left Joggins on 12 June to continue studying the known coal deposits of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick before moving on the Gaspé Peninsula.

Lyell and Dawson's discovery was relayed to the Geological Society in London on 19 January 1853, but unbeknownst to either of them a postscript had been added to their paper by Richard Owen, who had described and named the fossil as Dendrerpeton acadianum.

Darwin made a major breakthrough in 1860 when John W. Dawson published his paper reporting the discovery of Dendropupa, a non-aquatic animal, in the trunk of a fossilized lycopsid at Joggins.

[12] Dawson would devote much of his career to studying the Joggins Formation and again returned in 1877, undertaking an expedition funded by the Royal Society to search for more specimens embedded in the fossil lycopsids.

Explosives were detonated at Coal Mine Point, exposing twenty-five lycopsids; of these, fifteen contained vertebrate fossils representing over one hundred specimens, the largest single collection of Palaeozoic tetrapods ever found.

[13] Based on bivalve fossils recovered from the Joggins Formation, Joseph Frederick Whiteaves described Asthenodonta in 1893, but the genus was redescribed later that year by Thomas Chesmer Weston, who renamed it Archanodon.

Bell finally returned to Nova Scotia in 1926, and his research into Carboniferous plants would reveal that many of the species found in Atlantic Canada were also present in Western European deposits, providing evidence for the theory of continental drift.

The PWA succeeded in part because of their support for the community's funerary traditions, shutting down facilities like the Joggins Mine following a death and not returning to work until the deceased worker was put to rest.

[1][5] Reid provided the heritage site staff with a significant number of fossils from his own collection, and continued to hike along the Joggins Cliffs up until his death on 17 November 2016.

When the region was covered with marshland lycopods would put down rhizomes on the solid ground of newly made alluvial plains where young individuals faced little competition but were at risk of flooding.

If the river banks burst before the forest floor had accumulated a significant amount of peat, the lycopsids would be swamped by sand carried overland in a crevasse splay, burying the trunk and killing the lycophyte as well as any other living thing in or around it.

A diverse array of ichnofossils have also been found at Joggins, including vertebrate trackways, invertebrate trace fossils, tunnel structures, rhizoliths, and possibly wood borings.

A channel preserved in Cycle 9, at 580 m (1,900 ft) from the formation's base, represents a narrow distributary which delivered water directly to the sea, while the sediments found at Coal Mine Point suggest a meandering river covered the site.

hollandica N. obliqua N. tenuifolia indeterminate Palmatopteris P. alata P. furcata Paripteris P. pseudogigantea "Sphenopteris" S. valida Trigonocarpus T. parkinsoni Annularia A. acicularis A. aculeata A. asteris A. latifolia A. cf.