Mines in the Wrangell Mountains, 65 miles east of Chitina and only a few miles south of McCarthy, were world-class copper producers during the early 1900s. However, by the 1930s the copper reserves were...
From the 1911 completion of the Copper River and Northwestern Railway (CR&NW) until the mid 1930s, Cordova’s economy was primarily dependent on the railway and the shipment of copper ore from the mines at...
Numerous routes were considered for a railway to the Kennecott copper mines in the Wrangell Mountains. The most direct route was along the Copper River, but engineers hired by the Alaska Syndicate (which controlled...
During Cordova’s early days (1908-1911), when it was a boisterous railroad boomtown, the religious and social needs of both construction workers and the more genteel town residents were served by an Episcopal social club...
The Lowe River flows through Keystone Canyon east of Valdez. The canyon provides the only practicable land route out of Valdez, leading to Thompson Pass, which provides access to the Copper River Basin to...
Jack Dalton, perhaps best-known for opening Southeast Alaska’s Dalton Trail in 1894-95, was a wanderer. During his 30-plus years in Alaska, his meanderings covered large swaths of Southeast and Southcentral Alaska. Dalton came to...
Cordova’s old Post Office and Courthouse building as it looked in 2019 A 196-mile-long mining railroad, the Copper River and Northwestern Railway, once connected the port of Cordova in Prince William Sound with the...
The CR&NW messhall and bunkhouse in Chitina in the 1980s The two buildings shown in the drawing are in Chitina. They were built as a messhall and bunkhouse for the Copper River...
Hazelet’s house in Cordova as it looks today George Cheever Hazelet was a resident of Omaha, Nebraska when news of the Klondike gold strike reached the contiguous United States in 1897. Even though he...
The Red Dragon, a Christian social club run by the Episcopal Church, as it looked in 1909. The drawing is based on a photo in the Walter and Lillian Phillips photograph collection at...
