Primary Name: Thane, Bartlett L.

Filed as: Thane, Bartlett L.

Also known as: Bartlett Lee Thane; Bart Thane

Occupation / Association: Mining engineer; mine developer; Alaska Gastineau Mining Company executive

Associated places: Juneau, Alaska; Sumdum, Alaska; Sheep Creek, Alaska; Salmon Creek, Alaska; Annex Creek, Alaska; New York City, New York; Berkeley, California

Keywords: Bartlett L Thane, Bart Thane, Alaska Gastineau Mining Company, Perseverance Mine, Salmon Creek Dam, Sheep Creek Adit, Juneau Gold Belt, University of California Berkeley engineers, early Alaska mining engineers

Biography

Bartlett “Bart” Thane was a mining engineer whose work in the Juneau Gold Belt helped create one of the largest and most technologically advanced gold mining complexes in the world during the early twentieth century.

Thane was born in 1879 and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1898. While attending Berkeley he was the star quarterback of the university’s football team. Many of his teammates studied mining engineering and would later assist Thane in his ambitious mining ventures in Alaska.

At just under twenty years of age, Thane came to Juneau to begin his mining career. He was hired by veteran mining man Herman Tripp to operate and maintain the shaft pumps at the Sumdum Chief Mine, located approximately sixty miles south of Juneau. Although initially skeptical of college-trained engineers, Tripp quickly developed respect for the young engineer, beginning a lifelong friendship. Within three years Thane had gained a controlling interest in the Sumdum Chief Mine.

By 1911 Thane had successfully raised investment capital and obtained operational control of six gold mines in the Juneau Gold Belt. A mountain in the region was later named for him.

Through a complicated series of events Thane gained control of the Perseverance Mine near Juneau. The company’s president, Colonel William Sutherland, had been accused by stock and bondholders of mismanagement and was facing legal action. Sutherland died suddenly of a heart attack, and competing claims by two wives further complicated the estate. The company appeared hopelessly tied up in litigation.

With financial backing from prominent mining financiers D. C. Jackling and W. P. Hammon, Thane raised eight million dollars in 1912 to take over and redevelop the Perseverance Mine. His project would eventually become the Alaska Gastineau Mining Company, which developed into the largest gold mining operation in the world at the time.

Thane’s plan for the mine had three major components: providing tidewater access through a two-mile tunnel, developing year-round hydroelectric power, and constructing a revolutionary mill capable of processing thousands of tons of ore each day.

The Sheep Creek Adit, begun in November 1912 and completed in February 1914, was 10,497 feet long and at the time was driven at the fastest rate of any tunnel excavation in the world. The tunnel provided access from the Perseverance Mine to tidewater through the Sheep Creek Valley.

With assistance from former Berkeley teammates, Thane also oversaw construction of the Salmon Creek Dam. Completed as the first thin-arch concrete dam ever built, the structure stood 172 feet high and 648 feet across at the crest. The design proved revolutionary, and more than one hundred similar dams were later constructed around the world using the same principles first demonstrated at Salmon Creek.

The massive mill constructed for the Alaska Gastineau operation was designed to process up to 6,000 tons of ore per day using new rotating mills developed in the large copper mines of Nevada and Arizona. Completed in 1915, the mill exceeded expectations and was soon processing approximately 10,000 tons of ore per day at costs lower than projected.

To meet the growing demand for power, Thane developed another hydroelectric project at Annex Creek on Taku Inlet. The site was optioned from Herman Tripp in April 1915, and power was being produced by December of that same year. The project marked the first time a lake had been tapped by tunneling beneath it and blasting through the lakebed to release water for hydroelectric generation.

When the blast opened the lake, water reached the turbines two miles away in just forty-two minutes. The Annex Creek and Salmon Creek hydroelectric plants continue to generate power today and remain among the lowest-cost sources of electricity in Alaska.

For a brief period before World War I, the Alaska Gastineau Perseverance operation was the largest gold mining complex in the world and produced more than 500,000 ounces of gold.

The loss of labor during World War I and rising costs following the war made the operation unprofitable. On June 3, 1921, the mine closed.

Thane later attempted to repurpose the facilities for a large pulp mill development. In 1923 an agreement was reportedly reached with Japanese investors, but the catastrophic Yokohama earthquake that year killed the investors and the proposed pulp project collapsed.

Although his work had transformed the mining industry and left lasting engineering achievements, Thane died in New York City in 1927 reportedly embittered by the collapse of his final venture.

Upon hearing of his death, Fred Bradley, the legendary engineer behind the Treadwell and Alaska Juneau mines, remarked, “He built great monuments to man, but forgot what he was here for.”

Sources

Juneau mining historical records

Eva Adelia Kay Tripp was a Charter Member of the Juneau Igloo Women's Auxiliary No. 6 of the Pioneers of Alaska.

She was born on December 15, 1862, in Jackson, California, to Wallace Kay and Electra Jan “Harding” Kay.

Eva married Herman Tiden Tripp on April 23, 1889, in Jackson, California. The couple had several children. Their daughter Ethel May Tripp was born August 1, 1890, in Jackson, California. Chester Kay Tripp was born in March 1893, and Gladys Kay Tripp was born on January 21, 1896.

The family moved from Jackson, California, to Juneau, Alaska, in July 1897. By 1900, Herman Tripp was serving as the mine superintendent at Sum Dum, one of the early mining communities southeast of Juneau. Their daughter Eva Kay Tripp was later born in Juneau in December 1904.

Eva Adelia Kay Tripp remained active in the Juneau community and was among the women who helped establish the Juneau Igloo Women’s Auxiliary of the Pioneers of Alaska.

She died on January 27, 1942, in Juneau, Alaska, and is buried in Evergreen Cemetery.

Sources

1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, and 1940 U.S. Federal Census, Juneau, Alaska
California Marriage Certificate

Primary Name: Johnson, Evalina Kay Tripp

Filed as: Johnson, Evalina Kay Tripp

Also known as: Evalina “Eva” Kay Tripp; Eva Kay Johnson

Occupation / Association: Charter Member, Juneau Igloo Women's Auxiliary No. 6; stenographer

Associated places: Juneau, Alaska; Fairbanks, Alaska

Keywords: Evalina Kay Tripp Johnson, Eva Kay Tripp, Johnson family Juneau, Herman T Tripp family, Juneau Igloo Women's Auxiliary No 6, Juneau High School alumni, early Juneau families

Biography

Evalina “Eva” Kay Tripp was a charter member of the Juneau Igloo Women's Auxiliary No. 6 of the Pioneers of Alaska.

She was born on December 10, 1904, in Juneau, Alaska, the daughter of Herman T. Tripp and Eva Adella “Kay” Tripp. The Tripp family was among the early residents of the Juneau area.

Eva attended school in Juneau and graduated from Juneau High School in 1923. By 1930, she was living with her parents in Juneau and working as a stenographer in a surveyor’s office.

On September 2, 1934, she married Fred Briggs Johnson in Fairbanks, Alaska. The couple had one daughter, Eva Jeanette Johnson.

Evalina “Eva” Kay Tripp Johnson died on October 31, 1992, in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Sources

1910 / 1930 U.S. Federal Census, Juneau

Alaskaweb: Alaska Marriages

1923 Juneau High School Yearbook

The Governor's Mansion was designed by James Knox Taylor. He was a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, then serving as the first Supervisory Architect for the U.S. Treasury Department.

Taylor utilized design premises which had succeeded in Eighteenth Century English and American Colonial country houses.

These houses were designed to produce the most usable space for the cost, with facilities to perform the formal institutional functions required, and spaces amenable to formal and informal living under the same roof.

The examples he appeared to have followed had succeeded in performing these functions. The modifications he designed into this building succeeded admirably. An additional virtue of his design is that it permitted the basic building to be constructed and pressed into full service, with additional finishing construction, furnishing and decorating accomplished over a long period of time, as funds and authorization were provided.

An Act of June 6, 1900, provided that the temporary seat of government for the District of Alaska would be established in Juneau "when suitable grounds and buildings are available." From the passing of this 1900 Act by Congress until the Mansion was completed and occupied in 1913, a series of events—dramatic when considered as a totality moved forward the concept of more self-government for the Territory.

Continued Congressional attention to Alaska resulted in an Act for the Protection of Game, June 7, 1902; an Act Creating Road Districts and Providing for Road Overseers, April 27, 1904; the long-sought Delegate in Congress Act, May 8, 1906. The site of the building had been reserved in 1911 by Executive Order of the President, Number 1331. The Second Organic Act, August 24, 1912 provided that the capital of the Territory ". . .shall be at Juneau."

The Governor's Mansion, already under construction when the Act became law, thus became the first public building constructed for the new permanent capital of the Territory. The Alaska Governor's Mansion was first occupied by the Territorial Governor, Walter E. Clark, and his family, on January 1, 1913.

The Act also created a legislature of twenty-four members—two Senators and four Representatives from each of the four judicial division—to convene "at the capitol at the city of Juneau, Alaska on the first Monday in March in the year nineteen hundred thirteen, and on the first Monday in March every two years there after." The first legislature convened in space rented in the local Elks Club hall.

Juneau was a busy community. It had been founded as a mining camp, and had flourished as a result of the mines on both sides of Gastineau Channel and the marine commerce spawned by traffic between the lower states and the greater Alaska to the north and west.

A. H. Humpheries, an official of one of the mines recalls what Juneau was like in the era when the Governor's Mansion was under construction and the Territorial Government was about to begin full operation in the town, "Juneau in 1912 was alive and booming.

I had gone there from "The Westward" as we called it, out around Cordova and Valdez, after two memorable years in the Kennecott copper and Valdez trail country. ...men were shaved and groomed. Businessmen were in city clothes. A great treat to us was to see women and children on the streets and in the stores. ...the streets were thronged with pedestrians on the sidewalks. Horsedrawn vehicles threaded the centers.

I had spent five years in New York City. It never appeared to me so civilized as Juneau did that first day in 1910. The stores were busy, and displayed good merchandise.

Both the raised sidewalks and the streets in the main part of the city were of planking. They were very clean with streams from fire-hose nozzles. There was an efficient sewer system, ample electricity, and a telephone exchange with "hello girls" who would trace a party for you anywhere they could be reached. ...

The morning following our arrival, after breakfasting..., we sought out the source of the town's activity—the office of the Alaska Gastineau Mining Co., in the Valentine Building . . . and walked out with jobs. My friend was to work with Herman Tripp at Sum Dum Mine. ...Ed Russell published the "Dispatch." . . . "The Juneau Empire"... later, founded by John F. Strong and John W. Troy, . . .They had been associated in Nome with the "Nugget," and much later became governors of the Territory. ...

There was a staff-house with "private mess" down by Gold Creek at the foot of the tram and a big bunkhouse and a mess hall up the hill near the mine.... The mine was in the development and construction stages. Everybody in the organization was new and came from some other place.... ...the Alaska Gastineau mine was being developed for 6.000 tons of ore daily output.

The Alaska Juneau Mine, with an even more modern reduction plant, was planned for 10,000 tons a day, while across the channel the thirty-year-old Treadwell Mine properties were producing enough ore to keep some 2.000 stamps continuously pounding it to pulp 363 days a year. All this activity made the Juneau-Douglas operations for a short time at least, rank as the hard-rock miners' capital of the world....

I was thirty in 1913.... The very recollection of . . . that period fills me with pleasure. We can never recover the feeling we had toward each other in that distant simple age. The nearest I can think of to parallel it, would be a cruise ship that had been long enough at sea for everybody to get acquainted. We had a feeling of being of the world, but separated by time and distance. We were constantly refreshed by the arrival of new people from "below." ... at that period I had never met an adult Caucasian born in Alaska....

In 1912, the only automobile in town was Bart Thane's official Model T. It was chauffeur operated. The streets seemed full of horse-drawn vehicles, buggies, delivery wagons, big Studebaker ranch wagons, a lot of them designed so runners could be substituted for wheels when snow descended on the town. The freighters used "common sense" bob sleds in winter. There was no snow removal at that time. We just tromped it down and wore it out.

There was no radio, and no television in that distant age. But there was plenty of diversion in the big social hall for those off shift. We formed the Ptarmigan Club, and invited the whole town to a house warming dance when the place was opened for business....

It was almost the last stand in Alaska and in the West of the now forgotten art of driving workhorses. . . a string of five or six four-horse or six-horse teams, hitched to heavy Studebaker wagons, loaded high and safety-lashed, teamsters sitting on top or even standing precariously for a better view fore and aft with a handful of lines, would pull out of Willoughby Avenue at a fast walk along Front Street and then, with infinite care make the sharp turn up Seward—hoofs pounding, chains rattling, harness creaking, wheels rumbling, every axle speaking its piece—the leaders prancing proudly with necks arched under their reached manes. One team after another, that was the scene twice a day for several years. . . .

Jay Hayes, Alaska Road Commission superintendent . . . had to keep roads up without money.... By 1915 a few more autos appeared on the streets, plus a few delivery trucks. . . . Cash Cole bought a little red Model T.  Doc Loussac, the druggist, had a black one shipped up....

Juneau was a busy seaport with big cargo and passenger ships docking nearly everyday and sometime three or four...."

National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form