Minto did not feel the depression, or at least did not feel it in the same way as most other places in Canada; during recession and the Great Depression, Minto was profiting from a coal mining boom. The coal brought a level of financial prosperity to the community in the early 1900s, which by the late 1930s turned into a profitable venture for companies, and brought starvation and disease to a then impoverished community. As stated in the "United Mine Workers' Journal" of 1937, "Nowhere on the American continent, is there a strife which combines the elements of greed, harshness, cold, suffering, and want, as exists Minto."