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Alaska's Fallen Copper Kingdom

The Kennecott Mines were shut down so abruptly in 1938 that inhabitants rushing to catch the last train out of town left almost everything behind—including food on the table. ENLARGE
The Kennecott Mines were shut down so abruptly in 1938 that inhabitants rushing to catch the last train out of town left almost everything behind—including food on the table. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve

Kennecott Mines

National Historic Monument, Alaska

Visit Alaska, and mention of the Gold Rush is inescapable. But in the state's Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, situated in South Central Alaska, I also discovered—in the abandoned remains of the Kennecott Mines and its once thriving company town—ghostly evidence of the Copper Rush that animated the region early in the 20th century.

At 13.2 million acres, Wrangell-St. Elias is the country's largest National Park, but it receives only about 87,000 visitors per year, compared to the more than 9.6 million who visited Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 2012. Still, as a National Parks enthusiast who is also an amateur history buff, this was high on my must-see list. I arrived in this remote spot—some 320 miles from Anchorage and off the usual tourist path—after a long drive made lengthier by a last leg that bumped along a 60-mile unpaved road that ends at a footbridge closed to outside traffic. That left five more miles to traverse, either by foot (for hearty souls) or by local van shuttle (my choice; I'd save my energy for exploring the town and the surrounding park trails leading to glaciers and the abandoned mines themselves).

The panorama that greeted me was as eerie as it was inspiring: Perched against a stunning backdrop of towering mountains, blue-white glaciers and the gray-taupe hues of sloping glacial moraine sat a whole town almost all of whose wooden structures—large or small, deteriorated or intact—were painted barn-red with smart white-trim. Those buildings that were still standing, that is: What had been the busy sawmill had collapsed into a heap of wood.

Still standing was the power plant—though no steam had puffed through its four tall black stacks since the mines, and the town, closed down in 1938. Standing, too—though bolstered by continuing restoration work—was the hulking 14-story, 34,500-square-foot concentration mill that dominates the town. Striking as they are as architectural artifacts of a bygone era, however, it is the story they tell that fascinates. And the more I wandered, both on my own and as part of walking tours (offered for free by National Park rangers and for a fee by St. Elias Alpine Guides, with each providing entry to different buildings that are otherwise closed), the more astounded I was to learn of the engineering, mining and business feats accomplished in this remote location.

The tale begins in 1900 near the Kennicott Glacier (the different spellings date back to an error in the incorporating papers drawn up a few years later for the mine company), where prospectors came across an enormous cache of high-grade copper ore (about 70% pure). Even today, you might well find greenish-blue pebbles and rocks on the streets or on the nearby hiking trails that attest that there is copper in these hills, even if in far less a concentration than a century ago.

The initial copper find was a bonanza (hence the name, Bonanza Mine). But the lofty Wrangell Mountains that surround it boast some of the highest peaks in the country. From this wilderness, where dogsleds and pack horses provided the best available transport at the time, how did the copper company's backers—the Alaska Syndicate, a group that included the Morgan and Guggenheim families—figure they'd be able to move ton after ton of the metal to market?

The answer resided in the leftover railroad ties I saw on the street. The Alaska Syndicate funded and built the Copper River and Northwestern Railway, which opened in 1911 after four years of work and a cost of $23 million (approximately $560 million today), its purpose being to carry its copper cargo over 196 miles of seemingly impassable terrain to the port of Cordova, where it was then shipped by barge for smelting to Tacoma, Wash.

Equally crucial to the operation's success was the concentration mill.

It's impossible not to gawk at its unevenly stacked terraces, piggy-backed one upon the other and reaching heavenward—and that's pretty much all you will be able to do for about the next two years, while work continues on stabilizing and repairing the building's timber foundation, walls and roof. Still, from the must-see movie at the National Park Service Visitor's Center and Bookstore, you can get an idea of the technical innovations developed on site that made Kennecott Mines a major industrial force in the region, employing about 550 to 600 people.

Here, at the peak of this copper kingdom, during and after World War I, as much as 1,200 tons of ore was separated from waste rock every day but Christmas and July 4. Especially during World War I and the early 1920s, copper prices soared (to as high as 38 cents per pound) and so did profits. Underground, extensive tunnels connected the five mines; above ground, buckets of copper traveled via aerial tramways downhill from the mines several miles above to the concentration mill below, where the ore was crushed and sorted before being packed in burlap bags that were then piled in the open railcars bound for Cordova.

Enter the power plant and you're greeted by the musty smell of stale sawdust and overwhelmed by the size of the huge diesel-oil-powered generators. Still other buildings provide additional dramatic glimpses of the past: Empty meat hooks hang near a butcher table at the refrigeration plant. At one of the bunkhouses, sturdy wooden lockers, tattered curtain scraps, rusted sinks and graffiti-laden walls provide a window into miners' living conditions. As one of the guides reminded us, the mild summer weather and lovely vistas can make you forget that winter temperatures here can plunge to 50-below—so cold that miners were said to find it warmer to sleep in the mine tunnels during the long nights of that long season than to bed down in their minimally heated dormitories. Fortunately, at the privately owed Kennicott Glacier Lodge I found a comfortable spot to stay in the reconstructed replica of an apartment building that burned down years ago; all the walls are decorated with town artifacts, including original bills and papers from the mine itself.

While such details bring the past to life, they also serve as reminders that as the 1920s progressed into the 1930s, copper prices declined (to as low as five cents a pound) even as the highest-grade ore from the copper lode became steadily depleted. Having brought in about $100 million in profits through the years, the mines closed abruptly and permanently in 1938. The end came so swiftly that, rushing to make the last trains out of town, the inhabitants left almost everything behind—furniture, clothing, household goods, even food on the table. But the buildings remained. As time passed, decay set in. Scavengers took what they wanted. Fires and floods claimed several buildings. Nestled within Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, which itself did not come into being until 1980, the abandoned town gained designation as a National Historical Landmark in 1986. In recent years, thanks to the efforts of the National Park Service and such nonprofits as the Friends of Kennicott and Wrangell Mountains Center, this ghost town is once again coming alive.

Ms. Cole is the author of the memoir "After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges" and a contributing editor of The Psychotherapy Networker.

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