Holden Village, Washington — Copper Company Gave Away the Town

Holden Village began as a company town for a remote copper mine in the North Cascades.

During the 1930s, the Howe Sound Company built housing, a school, hospital, gymnasium and other facilities needed to support hundreds of people far from ordinary roads.

The mine closed in 1957.

Selling an isolated industrial town proved harder than extracting copper from the mountain.

A Lutheran Bible Institute student, Wes Prieb, eventually helped arrange transfer of the property for essentially nothing, and the mining settlement became a retreat and education center.

The reinvention preserved much of the town but could not erase the mine.

Decades of waste required a major remediation project, bringing heavy construction back into a community now devoted to worship, education and wilderness.

Visitors still generally arrive by boat on Lake Chelan and continue inland by road.

The company built Holden to get copper out.

What survived was almost everything else.