Kennecott, Alaska

Kennicott is an abandoned city in Alaska, north of Valdez in the Wrangell-St Elias National Park. Kennicott was the supply center of several copper mines.

History

In August 1900, the prospectors Jack Smith and Clarence Warner discovered a copper wire near the later city area and founded the mining company Chitina Mining and Exploration Company. An analysis of the ore showed a copper content of 70 %, and traces of silver and gold. Stephen Birch, a young mining engineer, bought the prospectors in the autumn of 1900 from the mineral rights to the mine for 275,000 U.S. dollars. The ore turned out to be the most productive at this time of the world.

1903 rose JP Morgan and the Guggenheim family as an investor and founded the Kennecott Copper Corporation. The company and the newly founded town was named after the Kennicott Glacier in the adjacent valley. Due to a clerical error, the Corporation bears the name " Kennecott " instead of " Kennicott ". From Kennicott from the five mines were Bonanza, Jumbo, Mother Lode, Erie and Glacier, of which the first four were connected by tunnels, managed.

1916 with a revenue of 32.4 million U.S. $ was the most productive year of mines. End of the 1920 production quotas began to subside. The Glacier Mine in 1929 was the first to be closed. This was followed by Mother Lode in July 1938 and the remaining three in September of the same year. The last train of the Copper River and Northwestern Railway left Kennicott on 10 November 1938 after 27 years of mining. During this period, 4.625 million tons averaging 13 -percent copper had been mined with a total value of about 200 million U.S. $.

From 1939 to the early 1950s, lived a family of three in the city, then Kennicott was abandoned by the end of the 1960s. Attempts to ore mining again failed due to the cost. An outline of the city was only partially carried out, so that a large part of the building still exists today.

Since the 1980s, Kennicott developed a tourist attraction that can be visited on the McCarthy Road from the nearby McCarthy. The city was declared on 23 June 1986 on the National Historic Landmark and the National Park Service acquired, in 1998 a part of the still located in privately owned urban area.