Kennecott

In the summer of 1900, prospectors Jack Smith and Clarence Warner identified what they thought was a green meadow on a remote Alaskan ridge. The patch turned out to be malachite associated with chalcocite, marking one of the richest copper deposits ever found in North America. Mining engineer Stephen Birch organized the financial syndicate that would develop it. By 1906, Birch had secured backing from the Guggenheim family and J. P. Morgan and Company, eventually raising over thirty million dollars to build a railway, steamship line, and the mining infrastructure itself.

The Copper River and Northwestern Railway reached the mine site in 1911. The Kennecott Mines Corporation built a model company town that included over seventy-six structures: bunkhouses, a school, a hospital, manager housing, and the fourteen-story timber-frame mill that remains the visual signature of the site. Ore was extracted from seventy-seven miles of underground tunnels in the Bonanza, Jumbo, and Mother Lode bodies and transported to the mill via three aerial tramways totaling about six miles.

Kennecott operated almost continuously from 1911 to 1938, with a brief closure in 1932. Across that period the mines produced approximately 4.6 million tons of ore yielding 1.183 billion pounds of copper. Falling copper prices during the Great Depression eroded the operation's margins, and by 1938 the known ore bodies were depleted. The mines closed, the railroad shut down, and Kennecott emptied within months.

The site sat largely abandoned for six decades. The National Park Service purchased the mill, power plant, and many other buildings from private owners in 1998 and began a long restoration program. Kennecott was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1986 and is now administered as a historic district within Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve.