Kennecott: a walk through the copper mill town

Welcome to Kennecott, the old mill town for one of the richest copper deposits ever found, deep inside Wrangell-St. Elias, America's largest national park.

Long before the mines, this was the homeland of the Ahtna people, and it still is. For generations they gathered pure copper nuggets in these mountains and worked them into tools, art and arrowheads, trading them over vast distances.

In the summer of 1900, two prospectors, Clarence Warner and "Tarantula" Jack Smith, were exploring along the edge of the glacier when they saw green cliffs high on the ridge above it. The green was copper ore, and it was exceptionally rich. Smith told a young mining engineer named Stephen Birch, "I've got a mountain of copper up there." Over the next twenty-five years, a whole company town grew up here.

This tour follows the main road through town, a little under half a mile from the visitor center to the power plant. Many buildings here are private homes and businesses, and some of the old ones are unstable, so stay on the road and the marked paths, and keep off decks and stairs. This is bear country, too. You don't need a signal. I'll tell you a story at each place and stay quiet in between.

This is the Kennecott Visitor Center, in the town's historic Blackburn School. In summer, rangers here can tell you about the day's history talks and the trails beyond town.

Imagine going to school here, next to a towering glacier and an extremely loud copper mill. And the students weren't only children. In the evenings, the company taught English and citizenship classes to its workers. By 1920, the night school had a hundred and twenty-six adult students from twenty-three countries, while the largest children's class had only twenty.

Now look out past the edge of town at that great gray, rocky plain. It isn't a field of mine waste. It's the Kennicott Glacier, twenty-seven miles of ice buried under a blanket of rock and grit carried down from the mountains. When the mines were busy, the ice stood higher than it does now, in places taller than the mill, the tallest building in camp. Like most Alaskan glaciers, it's shrinking.

The company took its name from that glacier, but spelled it with an e instead of an i, and people here have been debating the spelling ever since.

Movies played in this hall twice a week, on Sundays and Wednesdays. Children paid ten cents, grown-ups thirty-five. One local girl, Mildred Erickson, got in free by taking tickets. Years later, at seventeen, she came to the show on a date, and the ticket seller told the young man that Mildred always paid ten cents. She never forgot the embarrassment.

There were dances almost every Saturday, with coffee and cake afterward. And on Christmas Eve, the school children put on their program here, on a stage built just for the occasion. Christmas was one of only two days a year when the mines and the mill shut down. The other was the Fourth of July, when the whole town went five miles down the hill to McCarthy for races and a baseball game.

The hall holds a harder memory too. In 1921, a Ku Klux Klan minstrel show was advertised and staged here, in a camp that employed a great many immigrants.

Today, restored by the Park Service and a local nonprofit, the Friends of Kennicott, the hall hosts educational and community events again.

This building, the General Store and Post Office, connected the people of this remote town with the outside world. Families could buy just about anything you'd find in the lower forty-eight. If the store didn't have it, you could order from a catalog, and then wait a month or more for it to arrive. Today it holds the town's largest collection of exhibits, and it's where the park shows its film about the mill.

Next door is the Refrigeration Plant. Why would a town with a glacier in its backyard need a refrigerator? It didn't, really. But the company liked to use the latest technology, in this case the cooling power of compressed ammonia. If the doors are open, look inside for the compressor, the rail access that moved food in and out, and the meat hooks still hanging.

Apart from ore and water, everything here had to come from outside. To cut the cost of shipping food, a simple barn kept a few cows for fresh milk, families raised chickens for eggs, and gardens grew around the mill site.

The old depot stands by the road. From this town, the copper rode the rails to the coast, and ships carried it on to a smelter in Tacoma, Washington.

Just beyond, the road crosses National Creek. A mill can't run without water, and dams upstream on this creek and on Bonanza Creek supplied water for processing ore, for fighting fires and for drinking. In winter, when the creek ran low, people said the town could wear out water, using it over and over. At other times the creek flooded. As recently as October 2006, floodwater wiped out the old Assay Office and nearly took the Hospital and the East Bunkhouse.

That hospital opened in 1915 and treated the whole surrounding community, not just the workers. It had Alaska's first X-ray machine, and each employee paid eight cents a day for medical care.

The bunkhouses held most of the men, two to a room, for about a dollar and a quarter a day with meals. Some worked just three months to pay off their train fare; others stayed for years. Norwegians, Swedes and Irishmen worked here, and Japanese cooks fed the camp.

And here is the concentration mill, the tall red building with the jumbled roofline, about fourteen stories high. Ore came down to it from five mines high on the ridge, riding aerial trams at up to twelve hundred tons a day. One worker at the top of the mill remembered buckets arriving every fifty-two seconds, each holding about seven hundred and fifty pounds of ore, to be caught and dumped, all day long.

Inside, crushers broke the rock, and gravity and water carried it from one step to the next, separating copper from waste. The rich concentrate went into burlap sacks and onto rail cars. Over twenty years, as the ore grew poorer, the company kept adding to the building. In the leaching plant beside it, ammonia dissolved copper out of low-grade rock, and from 1923 a flotation plant mixed fine ore with oil and air, so the copper rose in a froth. Together, the processes captured nearly all of the copper.

The inside of the mill is open only on the concession's guided tour, so enjoy it from the road.

Here's the power plant, the building known for its four towering smokestacks. It went up in three stages between 1911 and 1924, and it powered both this town and the mines miles up the mountain. In August 1924 it burned down, and by October it was running again. Diesel generators, a steam turbine and a water wheel made electricity and steam heat, which reached buildings and homes through utilidors: warm passages under the wooden walkways that kept them clear of snow and ice.

Production peaked in 1925. As the rich ore ran out and railroad repairs grew costly, the mines closed in 1938, after about a hundred million dollars in profit. Only the most valuable things went out by train. Everything else, from dining tables to tram cars, was left behind. Small-scale mining, tourism and homesteading followed. The town became a National Historic Landmark in 1986, and the Park Service acquired many of its buildings in 1998.

This is the end of our tour. The road continues as a trail toward the Root Glacier, or you can stroll back through town. Take nothing from here but inspiration, questions and photographs. Thanks for walking with me.