Alaskan Copper Mining Town Gives Unvarnished View of Past

This vast, wild land has seen some audacious engineering efforts--the trans-Alaska oil pipeline comes to mind--but 60 years earlier one of the world’s richest copper deposits prompted a project whose scale and logistics still surprise.

The Kennecott Copper Corp. (the company name was misspelled by a clerk) has long since abandoned its settlement in the Wrangell Mountains, but the mining town remains a well-preserved piece of Alaska history.

It’s also that rare tourist attraction that isn’t a tidy, amusement park version of history: At Kennicott, the mining settlement’s buildings stand much as they were in 1938, when the mines closed. Most of the machinery still is in the mill building, ledger books still sit on shelves in the company store, and the powerhouse’s boilers look like they’re ready to make steam again.

The rail line from Cordova that was built to reach the mines crosses some of the most remote, forbidding territory on the continent. It squeezed between glaciers, snaked along the walls of deep canyons and spanned the surging Copper River. That trestle was replaced every spring because the river ice destroyed it in its rush to the Gulf of Alaska.

In mid-June, after three years of negotiations, the National Park Service agreed to purchase Kennicott’s 2,800 acres for $3.4 million. A group of Anchorage investors had owned it for the past 30 years.

That’s got some residents of nearby McCarthy a little nervous. The 1913 gold mining settlement, with a year-round population of about 40 people, is five miles down a gravel road from Kennicott, and served as a convenient red-light district for the copper miners.

Now, however, people who moved to McCarthy to escape civilization fear that the Park Service will simultaneously improve the 60-mile road to town from where the pavement ends at Chitina and restrict access to Kennicott’s buildings.

“We’re kind of spoiled here. This is the best-kept secret in Alaska,” said Dianne Milliard, a local photographer and curator of the McCarthy-Kennicott Museum. “It could turn into a tourist trap, and then it wouldn’t be this great place to live.”

The man who oversees Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, which Kennicott sits in the midst of, says he’s sensitive to those concerns. He promises to do nothing hastily.

Park Supt. Jonathan Jarvis said he wants to see the buildings kept open for tours.

At least some tours will have to be guided. The towering mill building, where ore was fed into the top by trams from the mines and came out the bottom ready for shipment, is too dangerous to give tourists free rein.

But the powerhouse, the bunkhouses and the company store all may be open for self-guided tours.

“Our intent is to essentially prescribe a safe route,” Jarvis said. “You can walk through George Washington’s birthplace, but you can’t jump up and down on his bed. There’s a way to do these things and protect people.”

The old railbed from Chitina, which still has spikes and ties exposed in some places, probably will be improved in the next five years, he said.

Kennicott was built beginning about 1910, a year before the 155-mile rail line from Cordova reached the mines. Tourists who make the trek along the abandoned railroad bed must leave their cars at the footbridge spanning the Kennicott River. Then it’s another five miles by shuttle, bike or feet, past McCarthy and on to Kennicott.

The company town sits at the base of Bonanza Ridge, whose peaks are 4,000 feet above town. Below town, and stretching north for miles, are the Root and Kennicott glaciers.

The town is set along either side of one road, and all the buildings are painted barn red with white trim.

The paint, loaded with lead, still looks respectable, but Jarvis said the Park Service is prepared to spend about $1 million in the next few years repainting the buildings and repairing siding and leaky roofs.

The mill building stands 14 stories high, but sits on a slope so steep that it’s possible to walk out the top story and comfortably reach the ground.

Inside the mill are floor after floor of machines designed to crush, grind and separate the ore. The technology wasn’t sophisticated--giant canvas belts still hang from the pulleys that drove the machinery, and everywhere are wooden chutes and hoppers used to send the ore down a floor to the next processing step.

There are brackets for fire extinguishers, but no safety rails to keep workers from getting caught in the machinery.

Across the street the company store is largely intact, with piles of receipts and the ledger books still readable, though faded from water damage.

What made the remote site profitable for the owners, the Morgan and Guggenheim families, also eventually led to its abandonment.

The copper ore found in the mines along Bonanza Ridge still ranks as among the richest ever discovered, said Logan Hovis, a Park Service historian. Many of the early lodes were 80% pure copper. Mines today make a profit on copper ore that has about 1% of the metal.

Historians have calculated that building and maintaining the railroad as well as operating the mine cost Kennicott’s owners $100 million in 1938 dollars. But the return on 28 years of copper production was about $300 million.

Kennecott closed its mines during the Depression because copper prices were low and new discoveries in Chile were producing far more economically than the Alaska mines.