Crofton had high hopes for the new century...

 

Crofton was an up & coming area at the start of the new century with unbridled confidence 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 the Pacific Coast, if not the largest north of San Fransisco.

It was to the Mount Sicker copper load that Crofton owed its birth as an industrial seaport.  Today virtually nothing of the cliffside 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 Lenora 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 two of the the then specialized Bessemere equipment, which was imported from Denver Colorado.  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 & lighting, 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.