Uranium Ore Sample - Faraday (Madawaska) Mine, Faraday Township, Hastings County, Ontario, Canada

This is a genuine piece of uranium ore from the Faraday Mine (later renamed Madawaska Mine) in Hastings County, Ontario, one of the most significant uranium-producing operations in the Bancroft area and a name deeply tied to Canada's mid-20th-century uranium mining history. The mine exploited uranium-bearing pegmatite deposits in the region, with a primary shaft eventually reaching 473 metres depth, and operated across two distinct production periods — 1954 to 1964, and again from 1976 to 1982 — yielding a combined 9 million pounds of U₃O₈ concentrate over its lifetime. Beyond uranium ore itself, the deposit is also known among collectors for producing calcite, ilmenite, kainosite-(Y), molybdenite, and uranophane specimens.

What makes this particular piece special is its provenance: it comes directly from a miner who worked at the Faraday operation, accompanied by his own handwritten notes on a scrap of paper — informal, original documentation straight from someone who was actually underground at the mine rather than a formal label or after-the-fact research. This kind of firsthand, working-miner provenance is exactly the sort of thing that's disappearing from the market as the generation who worked these Bancroft-area uranium mines gets smaller every year, and it adds a genuine human and historical dimension that no amount of locality research can replicate. The original notes will be included with the specimen exactly as received.

As with all radioactive specimens, standard handling and storage precautions apply — see our radioactive mineral policy for full details. For collectors of Canadian uranium mineralogy, Bancroft-area material, or mining history generally, a piece with documented, direct-from-the-source provenance like this is a genuinely uncommon find.

Approx. specimen size: 120mm x 100mm x 50mm

Approx. specimen weight: 756 grams

Approx. specimen activity on an SE International Ranger EXP: