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.