Crofton had high hopes for the new cantuary.

 

Crofton was an up & coming area at the start of the new centuary with unbridled confidemce in mining, agriculture & forestry. Henry H Newall of the new Crofton Gazette wrote ‘Crofton today has more than a dozen buildings, Crofton tomorrow could become one of the largest towns on tha Pacific coast, if not the largest north of San Framsosco.’

It was to the Mount Sicker copper lode that Crofton owed its birth as an industrial seaport. Today virtually nothing of the clifside town of Mount Sicker, the connecting narrow gauge ‘switchback’ rail  line, or any of the smelter works remains.  Henry  Croft (from  whom the town got its name) was the ambitious owner of the Leonora Mine.  His narrow gauge Mount Sicker  rail line was an  engineering marvel, who’s switchbacks  clung to the mountinside on the way down to Westhome. Croft employed Messrs Breen, Bellinger & Fotheringham from ‘south of the boarder’  to design & build his smelter (this later turned out to be a bad choice) They decided to use 2 of the the then specialized Bessemere equipment, which was imported from Denver Colarodo. All the rest of the equipment was purchased locally. The main smokestack was 12’ in diameter & 125’high, built with bricks imported as ballast from England. The Gazette reported in Feb 1902, that ‘the plant will be supplied with electricity & llighting, built so that they can rapidly enlarge without effecting their economical working, with the deep water dock making the importing of copper ore likely  from other places along the whole coast of British Colulmbia .