Lumbering has been going on in Kemptville as long as the village has been settled. In the beginning the logs were cut then were driven down the Tusket river every spring to Tusket, which was twenty-one miles south of Kempt. Later some mills were built in the village, and at one time there was as many as twenty small mills operating in the area. Some of those mills were Hurlbert's mill, Gray's mill, Morton's mill, Randall's mill and the Gang Sawmill. The Gang Sawmill was located at the bottom of the Gang mill hill in North Kempt, hence the name the Gang mill hill, the mill was once owned by Melford Prime and his sons. Once the lumber was cut it was either rafted or driven by ox teams to Tusket, Wedgeport, Brazil Lake, Yarmouth, etc.. Since the 20's large quantities of pulp wood and logs have been cut and trucked out of Kemptville to a number of sawmills. Today the wood is trucked to a number of sawmills Lewis Lumber (Weymouth) owned by J.D. Irving, E.M. Comeau (Meteghan), Austin Hurlbert (Pleasant Vally), A.F. Therauilt (Corberrie) and Emerald Forest Products (Yarmouth). The pulpwood is trucked to Bowater (Liverpool), J.D. Irving which is boated across to Saint John. There are three people who run their own small mills in Kemptville, they are Darrell Allen, Tommy Fuller and Royce Jellison. All of those sawmills are portable mills. 

Gold was discovered by James and Joseph Reeves in 1881. In 1885 a mill license was granted to Stephen Northrup. The gold mine was located near the foot of Crawley Lake, often called the Back Lake and in 1963 the mine was closed. The way that the gold was mined was by sinking deep holes into the ground and mining the gold from the bottom of the hole. One problem with this type of mining was if it rained or snowed you couldn't mine because the pit would fill up until you pumped it out by hand or later with a mechanical pump. You can still see the old mine shafts today even though the surrounding area has grown up since the mine closed. As well as gold mining the village had another shot at the mining industry with a tin mine in the area. The mine was built in 1985 and started mining that same year, it cost $155 million to build. The mine was not as successful as once hoped and was closed in Jan 1992, laying off several hundred workers. The closing of the Tin mine and the Cotton mill in Yarmouth around the same time helped send the people of Yarmouth and surrounding areas into the state of economics which we were in up until the present time. The mine was torn down two years ago at a cost of $15 million. The mine site now looks like there was no mine there in the first place, except for a few buildings, which is used to monitor the site and the tailings pond (which is more like a lake than a pond) and the open pit (which has filled up with water, so that it is now a man-made lake).