Alaskan Ghost Town
It’s all still there. A ghost town of clapboard buildings, some wrecked by the elements, some unsteadily standing, some restored to the condition they were in when the town was abandoned in 1938. Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark, in the remote heart of the Wrangell St. Elias National Park and Reserve, Alaska, is a history buff’s treasure and steampunk dream.
In 1900, prospectors looking beyond the gold rush fields in the remote hills of Alaska discovered one of the richest copper veins in the world, and the industrial giants of America rushed in to exploit it. Now, over a hundred years later, you can stand at the top of the mill and look down fourteen stories to the ghost town. A spate of buildings, once impressive, now tattered, are spread below. Nearly all are red — the color of cheap industrial paint. The general manager’s office, the power plant with its four impressive smoke stacks, and the sacking shed are nearest to the mill. Not far is the hospital, the single white building. A railroad bridge spans the creek, with a small, tidy depot at its farther side. Beyond the creek is the realm of people rather than machines: the general store, bunkhouses, school and recreation hall. The old carriage road brought wagons into town, and carried the dead to the cemetery a discreet mile away.
In the distance, the sun shines brilliantly on snow-covered Mt. Blackburn, a 16,000 foot peak. The town overlooks a broad valley of unknown depth, filled with glacial moraine. It looks like an exceptionally uneven, gravel-covered plain, but when the sun shines on it, you can glimpse the ice that underlies the dirt. When the town was in its prime, the glacier was two hundred feet higher than it is today — the glacier has retreated in the warmer temperatures of the last century.
If the mill was the beating heart of the town, the railway was its major artery. The railway brought sustenance to the mill — machines, supplies and many, many men. But its true purpose was to send away the mill’s production, high-grade copper ore. Built from wilderness and the labor of six thousand men, the railway crossed 196 miles of forested gorges, over ninety-five miles of bridges, at the then-astronomical cost of $23 million. The railway went west to the coast at Cordoba, where a new steamship line, created solely for the purpose, carried the ore to the refinery. All this was built to fuel the industrial age’s huge appetite for copper.
High above the mill, five mines delved into the side of the mountain. Using explosives and pickaxes to burrow into the rock, men created seventy miles of tunnels to extract the seams of rich ore. Men lived and died in the mines, sleeping in hastily erected wooden dormitories perched on the side of the mountain. The buildings can still be seen, leaning precariously on nearly inaccessible slopes.
A cable tramway connected the mines to the top of the mill. At the mouth of the mines, men stood at the edge of the cliff and loaded rock into immense steel buckets slowly circulating from the mill below. Once loaded, weight carried the huge buckets in a steady stream down to the mill. There the buckets, still moving, were tipped to empty them, and the buckets returned up to the mines to be refilled.
From the buckets, the mine’s rocks were dumped into the maws of the crushers. Lubricated by water from the local creek, the crushers relentlessly reduced the mines’ output to gravel, to pebbles, and eventually to sand.
Continuous shifts manned the mines and the mill, long before “24/7” became a catch-phrase. The buckets came and went without ceasing, and the mill’s thunder went on all day and all night, all week without rest. Men worked continuously during the pleasant warmth of summer days so long that the sky was light around the clock, and through the unbearable cold of winter’s endless darkness, when the sun seemed only a pale memory. And at each step in the complex mining and milling process, a moment of weakness or weariness or incaution could send a hand, a leg, or life into the merciless machinery.
The mill building, all fourteen stories, was made entirely of wood. The risk of fire was a constant fear. Machines ruled here. The structure was designed to house the giant crushers and sorters — people were an afterthought. Bits of the mill were torn away and additions tacked on to accommodate new processes as the mountain surrendered ore of declining quality. Passageways are narrow and subject to blind turns and dimly-seen obstructions. While you are watching your feet, a low beam suddenly looms. Lightbulbs, shaded by tin shades, hang from wires suspended from the ceiling. Stairways are narrow and steep, little more than ladders.
Driven by water and gravity, the ore made it way from one process to the next, from each floor to the one below. On one floor a massive steel drive chain lies in a crumpled heap, like a titan’s discarded bicycle chain. An iron flywheel with a diameter more than a man’s height is so huge that it had to be shipped in two halves and bolted together on the mill floor. The mill’s machines were driven by engines that turned without pause, turning drive shafts that distributed motion to drive wheels, and thence to drive belts, thence to other wheels and other belts, and finally to crushing hammers and shaking screens and tables. Huge woven drive belts as wide as firehoses still make figure-eight loops from one story to the next, and miraculously still encircle their drive wheels.
All the back-breaking work and danger culminated at the base of the mill in bags of concentrated ore. The precious ore was prosaically bagged in burlap coffee bags, sewn shut by hand, and tossed onto the waiting railcars. Layers of salt separated the layers of bags, to preventing their freezing into a solid mass in the harsh climate.
The business was not without its concern for the workers — all unmarried men. Steam from the power plant was piped into the town’s buildings to warm them. A hospital had the first x-ray machine in Alaska: no doubt it was well used. Records of fatalities have been lost, but the small cemetery with worn crosses is still visible. A recreation hall offered some respite for workers, including basketball, baseball, and moving picture shows. The town of McCarthy, five miles away, provided saloons and dance halls.
They left it all behind. In 1938, as the rich copper vein was played out, and the price of copper dropped precipitously in the Great Depression, the decision was made to close the mining operation. On few hours’ notice, everyone left on the last train. The mines, the mill, the power plant, the bunkhouses, and the town were deserted. It would cost too much to ship anything but essentials out to the coast, so everything was left behind.
And it is still there.
Go visit the Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark, in the Wrangell St. Elias National Park and Reserve, Alaska. Go during the May-mid September season. To get there, take a 20-minute scenic flight to McCarthy from Chitina, or drive the McCarthy Road, a 62-mile, one-lane gravel road that follows the old railway bed from Chitina and ends in a pedestrian bridge. The National Park Service and private guide services provide tours of the buildings — some reconstructed and some stabilized in their current state — and hikes onto nearby Root Glacier, and the Kennicott Glacier Lodge provides comfort and wonderful meals.
Go, and see this slice of history for yourself.
