The Kennicott copper mine near McCarthy, AK was a very productive mine from 1910 to 1938. It produced over $200 million of copper and in today’s money would be a couple of billion. It primarily fed the voracious appetite for copper to build the electrical wiring network on the East coast. The mine is five miles up in the mountains and transported the copper ore to the processing facility via overhead tram. These red buildings are the processing and sorting facility where they smashed and separated the copper from other rocks, bagged it and sent it via train to Cordova, AK and then to a smelter in Tacoma, WA via ship. The facility is fourteen stories high and utilized gravity to assist in the sorting process.
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