Kennecott, Where the Town Outlived the Ore

In the long northern dusk of late August, the wind moves through the windows of a six-story building that has no floor left in places. The Kennecott mill hangs over the graveled valley, its wooden frame weathered to a silver-gray. A few sheets of corrugated metal clatter where a hinge has rusted through. The town below is quiet, and has been quiet since 1938.

Kennecott was built for a single reason. In the early years of the twentieth century, prospectors found the largest known copper ore deposits in the world along the slopes of the Wrangell Mountains, and a railroad was pushed through the wild country to reach them. The Kennecott Copper Corporation built the mill to process the ore, and the town to house the men who ran it. For about three decades, the mine produced millions of tons of copper, much of it high-grade ore that did not need much concentrating.

The mill and the town were never designed to last. The buildings were erected quickly, with timber and metal, on steep terrain, with an eye to the day when the ore would run out. What is remarkable is how much remains. The mine buildings, the tramway terminals, the bunkhouses, the offices, the recreation hall—all stand as they were left. It is not a restored town. It is one that was simply abandoned and then preserved by winter.

The red mill building dominates. Its stories are stacked against a black rock wall, a vertical honeycomb of chutes and rooms. The tramway cables climb the mountain to the mines, and the trestles still stand in places, slender wooden legs stepping up the slope. At the edge of the town, tailings form a gray apron along the creek. Nothing moves except the light.

Kennecott was a company town in a valley with no road to it for much of its life. Everything came by railroad from the port at Cordova, and everything the mine produced went back out the same way. The rails were pulled up long ago. The line of the railroad is still visible in the grade that enters the valley, and the town lines up along it.

The structure of the town is simple. Houses and dormitories crowd close to the mill, and the mine office anchors the lower end. The geography made it intimate. The valley walls are steep and close, and in winter the sun clears the ridges for only a few hours a day. Snow buries the lower floors of the buildings and drifts across the porches. The cold holds the wood and paint in a kind of suspension.

When the vein ran out in 1938, the company packed up and left. The machinery was shipped away, and the people left too. There was nothing else in the valley to keep them. The town was boarded up and put under a caretaker's eye, a hand-off that kept vandals out and left the buildings intact for decades. The U.S. National Park Service now administers the site as part of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, and visitors can walk the gravel lanes and look through the windows at desks, tools, and machinery left in place.

The preservation is a strange thing. Most abandoned mining towns were scavenged for usable lumber and ore cars, then burned or flattened. A few were tarted up and turned into tourist fronts. Kennecott sits somewhere between, too remote to be stripped clean, too fragile to be lightly used. The Park Service has stabilized some buildings but has not made them pretty. Rust streaks run down the mill's face, and the glass is gone from many windows. The signs warn of rotten floors and falling debris, and the sound of the wind in the metal is part of the exhibit.

What remains is the shape of an industrial enterprise in a particular time and place. Men went into the mountain with drills and blasting powder. Ore came out in a stream of rock and dust, hit the crushers, rode the conveyors, and dropped into railcars below. The copper wire that electrified early twentieth-century America was shipped from a valley that only a handful of people ever saw. That is the odd arithmetic of the place: the labor, the distances, the tonnage, the silence now.

The town is not a ghost in the usual sense. It is too solid for that. The mill looks as if its operators stepped away for a long weekend and simply never returned. But there are no clocks running, and no smoke from the stacks. The copper is gone. All that remains is the wooden city that was built to get at it, left standing on the last day of the work.

That is the lesson of Kennecott. The resource is one thing; the town is another. The town was never meant to survive the resource. It did, by accident, because the railroad was torn up and the road was long, and the cost of pulling a building apart exceeded the value of its lumber. A place built to be temporary turned out to be permanent, not as an act of will, but as an act of neglect.

Late-summer visitors walk the boardwalk above the floodplain and look up at the buildings that have outlasted every intention behind them. A raven lands on a roofline. The clouds move over the Wrangells. The mill goes on holding its freight of empty air.

Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve

Photos: Wrangell-St. Elias National Park (CC BY-SA 2.0)