Cu Later

 

Kenn-e-cott   or   Kenn-i-cott

or some even spell it Kenn-y-cott (but I could not find a picture).

Regardless of how you want to spell Kennecott, for a ghost town, it’s a pretty cool place.  And Copper (Cu, as an element) is its claim to fame.  

In 1986, Kennecott became a National Historic Landmark so everyone can see what makes this area so famous, and cool.  But now, some history.

In the 1880s, Jack Smith and Clarence Warner came through the Fourth of July pass into the Copper River Valley area. (The Pass is the “V” in the middle of the picture below.)

They met the indigenous Ahtna (Ah-t-na) people living in the area and saw that they had copper tools and arrowheads. Smith and Warner knew the value of copper and started talking with natives about where to find it.  Eventually, Smith and Warner worked out a deal and traded with the Ahtna’s to acquire the land where the copper was being found.

In the early 1900s, another adventurous mining engineer named Stephen Birch came to the area and saw the quality of copper Smith and Warner were mining.  Birch, backed by the Guggenheims and JP Morgan, started negotiating with Smith and Warner to purchase their mine. In 1906 a deal with struck where Birch purchased the Kennecott mine and surrounding land from Smith and Warner for $1 million (in 1906 dollars).

In 1907, Birch started building the railway to carry supplies to Kennecott, and the copper ore down to the Alaskan coast.  It took four years and $24 million more to complete the 196-mile railway across glaciers, multiple rivers, and steep mountains to finally arrive at the coastal town of Cordova, AK.  You can still see remnants of that railway all along the McCarthy Road. But more about the railway in a later post.

With the railway completed, they could now could start bringing more lumber and materials up to Kennecott to build the mine and infrastructure that was necessary to mine the copper. 

This is the remnants of the first building built at the Kennecott mine. It was the lumber mill! Unfortunately, they used soft spruce wood, which does not last very long, to build the lumber mill. You can see a planer and old generator used at the lumber mill still sitting in what’s left of the building. Once the lumber mill was built, they brought lumber made of the harder Douglas fir trees up from Cordova to build the actual mine and all of the buildings. That’s why the original buildings are still standing, and are in such good shape, compared to the lumber mill

This is a picture of the 14-story, 34,500 sq ft processing facility at the Kennecot mine.  

I was able to take a tour inside this building starting from the top, following the process down throughout the building.  There were actually 4 mines where they extracted the copper ore.  They trolleyed the ore from the mine into the building, crushed the limestone to get to the copper, and by the bottom of the building, they bagged it into 140 pound bags to throw onto the train.

Here is a picture of the Lincoln-log interior structure used for walls and support within the mill on the various floors of the building.

The brown building on the left was the hospital.  While the red building in the middle was the worker’s bunk house, and the red building on the right was a guest house for visiting business men or family.  There was also a fantastic waterfall in between the buildings.  (These are the same buildings but from different angles.)

The copper was shipped from Cordova to Tacoma, Washington, where it was smelted into a refined product. The copper mine was in production from roughly 1911 until 1938 when it became cost prohibitive to mine any more copper due to the market price of copper.  Kennecott was a revolutionary mine utilizing many new methods to extract as much copper as possible. It is said that they were able to extract 98% of the copper that they mined.  

At the height of operations, more than 600 people from over 20 countries worked at Kennecott.

In roughly 25 years, the Kennecott mines produced 46 million tons of copper, yielding $100 million profit (roughly $2 billion today).  They also were able to extract 9 million ounces of silver, from the same mines, generating another $100 million of profit.  It is said that 1/3 of the world’s copper was mined from the Kennecott mines.  Any way you crush it, the Kennecott Mine helped put this area on the map, and the world.  

You should really come see it yourself.