Keno City museum details mining history

“Museum project back on track,” reads a handwritten sign on the community club door of this northern community with a population of about 45. Inside, club President Mike Mancini, 30, dark-haired, sporting a mustache and dressed in blue jeans, answers the telephone.

“Community club,” Mancini says. It’s after 4 p.m., when the lounge opens at the Keno City Hotel, the only watering hole in the nearly deserted silver mining town in the central Yukon. The cafe across the street doesn’t open at all anymore, since the mine shut down at nearby Elsa.

But Mancini is busy. There’s the pending influx of participants in a heritage workshop. The topic is preservation of old machinery, something there’s a lot of in the surrounding hills.

There’s a bigger job too — the club’s plans to repair the foundation on the 1922 building that houses the Keno City Mining Museum, which the club owns, with a recently approved $196,000 grant from the Yukon government Community Development Fund.

The project, which involves moving exhibits to temporary locations around Keno while the 2-storey wood structure is stabilized, is to employ nine people.

“That’s the only building in town we have to work with that dates back that far,” Mancini explains.

Known as Jackson’s Hall before the museum opened 12 years ago, the building served as dance hall, movie theatre and community meeting place for miners and their families from the 1920s to the 1960s, when a new hall was built. The cluttered museum, with exhibits unfettered by protective glass, tells the story of one of the richest, most productive silver-mining areas in Canada. Prospectors arrived before the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-98, returning as the Klondike became staked out and finding silver-lead ore at Galena Creek in 1906.

But Louis Beauvette’s discovery of a silver vein at Keno Hill in 1919 sparked a rush that dotted the hills with tent camps and eventually mining towns with names such as Wernecke, Calumet, Elsa and Keno. United Keno Hill Mines (TSE) began mining around Elsa in 1948 and was once the fourth largest silver producer in the world, but closed down in 1989.

The museum building still has small square holes in one wall, where movie projectors went, and movie seats lean against the opposite wall. It offers much more: the home and work tools of people living in a harsh, isolated environment.

Museum curator Debby Kludash offers a wealth of fascinating tidbits as she walks through the building with visitors. Kludash once lived in Elsa but now makes Keno home year-round, with her placer-mining husband and her two children.

Kludash points out a Listerine bottle dating from around 1900, a rocking wooden washer, cans of Lucky Strike Cola, and the old telephone exchange that all calls went through (for those lucky enough to have phones). The museum has handmade axes, and huge saws used to cut blocks of ice, which Kludash says were covered in sawdust and used for refrigeration on the steamboats that carried ore and supplies along the Stewart River. There are old safety helmets, drill bits and a hand-cranked wooden bucket to haul ore from underground.

Upstairs, there are countless old photographs, many from the collection of William Hare, a mechanic in Elsa who took pictures as a hobby. In one photo, a baker in long white coat and bow tie pulls perfect loaves of bread out of a big oven. Kludash says food was reputedly excellent at the mining camps. She describes how a plumber at Elsa used to phone different camps and ask what was for lunch, then find a reason to make a visit to the camp with the most enticing entree.

One of the more unusual artifacts is an electric “addressograph” that United Keno Hill used for employee paycheques, complete with personalized metal plates to insert for each worker.

Mancini says, “I dragged that over from Elsa last year. They were going to throw it away. It was in mint condition.”

Mancini says the machine was used until about 10 years ago. It’s one of many relics he has retrieved from old mines and garbage dumps in the area he grew up in. His dad was a miner at Elsa.

“Every time I go to Mayo or Elsa I come back with a truckload of stuff,” he says.

Mancini says other Keno City residents are now realizing how valuable some of these rusting castoffs can be, in developing tourism and preserving the heritage of the Silver Trail.

“A lot of camps were pretty well levelled over the years,” he says. “It was basically as business goes, they need an open pit, they make an open pit.” Both Wernecke and Calumet no longer exit. Mancini says he is determined to pick up all the pieces of Elsa so its story can be told. (If the Elsa mine, now owned by Bharti Laamanen of Sudbury, Ont., reopens, it would be run as a mining camp, not a town.)

The museum already attracts about 500 people a month in the four months it operates. While the foundation work is being done, Mancini plans to house some of the many exhibits in two restored log cabins built by miners. Next summer, Kennethy Bradshaw’s Yukon Friends, a photo exhibit of life in Elsa and Keno in the 1950s and 1960s, will be on display in Keno City. By that time, one of Mancini’s other projects — a community-run campground — just might be finished, too, so that more tourists will drive the scenic mountainside highway and bring new life to Keno City.