Cavanagh Construction eyes 111-acre expansion of west Ottawa quarry

Quarry
Quarry

A local construction firm is resurrecting plans to open a new quarry off Highway 7, west of Stittsville, to excavate aggregate materials used in road construction and building site preparations.

Thomas Cavanagh Construction has filed a rezoning application for its property at 1156 Jinkinson Rd. It’s adjacent to the company’s existing Henderson Quarry, approximately 30 kilometres southwest of Parliament Hill and 10 kilometres east of Carleton Place.

Planning documents say the proposed extraction area will be approximately 111 acres, with no limit on the amount of aggregate material that can be removed each year.

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The quarry’s normal hours of operation will be between 6 a.m. and 7 p.m., although that may be expanded to 24 hours a day to supply night paving contracts, planning consultants write.

Cavanagh Construction previously prepared a rezoning application, which would reclassify the property from “mineral reserve” to “mineral extraction,” in 2014, according to Ottawa Community News.

In addition to the existing Henderson I site, there are several active quarries in the area, according to planning documents, including R.W. Tomlinson’s Stittsville Quarry and Dibblee Paving and Materials’ Bell Quarry to the northeast as well as the Cavanagh Beagle Club Quarry to the south.

Henderson Quarry’s (ancient) history

“The Henderson Quarry was submerged by the early Champlain Sea and in the early stages of recession it was a shallow riverbed; perhaps gouged by ice and scoured by currents … (After 8000 B.C.), in the early Archaic (period), it would have been on the shore of a large shallow lake. By Middle Archaic times the marshy lake would have given way to the cedar swamp of modern times.


The study area was cleared and cultivated in the late 19th (century) and occupied until the middle of the 20th century … probably (serving) as rough pasture. By the 1970s the property was fallow and became overgrown with saplings (birch, poplar, spruce) and juniper bushes.”

Source: 2011 archaeological assessment by Kinickinick Heritage Consultants

 

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