By Hank Nuwer
Bad news made headlines on April 1, 1937, but it was no April Fool’s joke.
Officials at the Kennecott Corporation announced on April 1, 1937, that the copper mine would close within two years. Although copper prices remained strong, the richest ore bodies had largely been exhausted. Despite expensive exploration, the company found no new deposits worth developing.
Any residents wanting to leave needed to start packing household goods and valuables.
When the last day of work was over, the Copper River and Northwestern Railway also planned to shutter its business.
Except that the end occurred faster than the forecast.
The last bucket of ore was to ascend on October 27, 1938.
And so, a Cordova civic leader came to witness history. James L. Galen, owner of the Alaska Transfer Company and president of the Mount McKinley Park Tourist and Transportation Company, had witnessed the ceremonial first bucket of ore taken out in 1911.
Mine officials changed the final date of operation to October 26.
“I was somewhat disappointed,” he told the Alaska Miner newspaper.
On November 17, 1938, the entire work force of the formerly booming Kennecott Mine consisted of just three security guards, the Alaska Miner announced. Moreover, that day the last train to Cordova left the station. The Alaska Road Commission said for now it would maintain the 84-mile railway between McCarthy and Chitina.
Those remaining in McCarthy faced a gloomy future. The one glimmer of hope for townspeople came from an announcement that the federal government might set aside the area for a national park. Ernest Gruening, director of the Division of Territorial and Island Divisions, Department of the Interior, scouted the area after Kennecott announced its plans to shut down.
Mrs. Kate Kennedy, owner of the Alaska Hotel for 20 years, left McCarthy after the Kennecott Corporation pulled up stakes. She traveled widely, attending separate World’s Fairs in New York and San Francisco. She moved to Oregon in 1939 for a quiet retirement and died three decades later in Salem in 1969.
She had been a local entrepreneur and celebrity in McCarthy. She came to the Klondike seeking gold at age 16 in 1898 with husband Charles Kennedy. She was strong and fearless and could drive a dog team as well as any Alaskan musher.
The couple moved about a lot. They lived for a time in Dawson and then Candle, where they had a roadhouse. A visiting Episcopal Archdeacon later wrote that Mrs. Kennedy permitted lodgers to indulge in “assignations.”
When the Alaska territorial Legislature met in January of 1913, Charles Kennedy was an elected member.
Kate and Kennedy divorced in 1914. Mrs. Kennedy started enterprises in Blackburn and McCarthy. She made her fortune offering rooms, taxi rides, whiskey and meals to miners with pay in their pantaloons who came to town from the bunkhouses to blow off steam. And once again, she allegedly permitted assignations.
By November 1940, the once bustling streets of McCarthy heard few footsteps any longer. Knowing a business was closed for good, or that a house was boarded up, looters took whatever they wanted.
Then, on November 7, a raging fire consumed the main business and residential block. Only the house belonging to Pete Brenwick could be saved.
The fire began with temperatures hovering around 15 below zero when a forced-draft furnace malfunctioned and ignited around 7 p.m. at the home of Ora Haug Jackson, about 45, wife of Ben Jackson. He was not home and was uninjured.
The previous October, Ben Johnson had become one of 25 charter members of an Alaska postmaster chapter.
Miner Bill Howell tried to rescue Mrs. Jackson, but falling debris crushed his foot, and he needed rescuing. The rescuers transported him to the hospital in Cordova.
Also destroyed were Mrs. Kate Kennedy’s Alaska Hotel, Steve Pytel’s Portland Grocery, the town’s drugstore and the radio station of the Cordova Air Service.
Many buildings abandoned after Kennecott’s announcement also went up in smoke.
The single remaining business in McCarthy was Jack O’Neill’s general store. At the time, O’Neill’s was all that remained of a bustling, pioneer community that once served the miners living in company bunkhouses on the outskirts of town.
Oldtimers recalled that McCarthy had suffered four fires between 1919 and 1921. The worst occurred on unlucky Friday the 13th in 1921. A fire believed caused by the abandoned cigarette of a lodger, consumed Pete Johnson’s McCarthy hotel, a pool hall, several residences and a henhouse with about 100 chickens.
Kate Kennedy’s eight-room residence was destroyed—just as her hotel would be in 1940. Undeterred, she built a new home and bought the Alaska Hotel.
In 1940, the largest reported exodus of residents, predictably, occurred in McCarthy, according to the Alaska Census.
Only the names of 77 McCarthy residents were recorded in 1940, down from 637 residents in 1930.
The town had become a virtual ghost town except, some joked, even the ghosts had moved away.
Editor’s note: Kennecott was also known as Kennicott and Kennecott Mines.
Hank Nuwer teaches journalism at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and writes for the Cordova Times