Anyox was a small company-owned mining town in

British Columbia British Columbia is the westernmost Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Canada. Situated in the Pacific Northwest between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains, the province has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that ...

, Canada. Today it is a

ghost town A ghost town, deserted city, extinct town, or abandoned city is an abandoned settlement, usually one that contains substantial visible remaining buildings and infrastructure such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economi ...

, abandoned and largely destroyed. It is located on the shores of Granby Bay in coastal Observatory Inlet, about southeast of (but without a land link to) Stewart, British Columbia, and about , across wilderness east of the tip of the

Alaska Panhandle Southeast Alaska, often abbreviated to southeast or southeastern, and sometimes called the Alaska(n) panhandle, is the southeastern portion of the U.S. state of Alaska, bordered to the east and north by the northern half of the Canadian provi ...

Early history

The remote valley was long a hunting and trapping area for the Nisga'a, and the name Anyox means “hidden waters” in the Nisga'a language. The first Europeans in the area were the members of the Vancouver Expedition, who surveyed the inlet in 1793. Nisga'a legends told of a mountain of gold, attracting speculators for years. In 1910, the Granby Consolidated Mining, Smelting and Power Company (Granby Consolidated) started buying land in the area. They soon found gold.

Town and mines

Granby Consolidated started construction of the town in 1912. By 1914, Anyox had grown to a population of almost 3,000 residents, as the mine and smelter were put into full operation; rich lodes of copper and other precious metals were mined from the nearby mountains. Granby Consolidated moved its copper mining interests here from Phoenix, British Columbia. Copper was mined from the Hidden Creek and Bonanza deposits and smelted on site.

Coal Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other Chemical element, elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. Coal i ...

to fuel the

smelter Smelting is a process of applying heat and a chemical reducing agent to an ore to extract a desired base metal product. It is a form of extractive metallurgy that is used to obtain many metals such as iron, copper, silver, tin, lead and zin ...

was shipped from the company built and owned town of Granby on

Vancouver Island Vancouver Island is an island in the northeastern Pacific Ocean and part of the Canadian province of British Columbia. The island is in length, in width at its widest point, and in total area, while are of land. The island is the largest ...

and Fernie in southeastern British Columbia. Anyox had no rail or road links to the rest of British Columbia, and all connections were served by ocean steamers, which traveled to Prince Rupert ( southwest) and

Vancouver Vancouver is a major city in Western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the cit ...

. The company town was a very large operation, with onsite railways, machine shops, curling rink, golf course and a hospital. In the spring of 1918, Granby Consolidated built the first wooden tennis court in Canada for additional recreation. The same year, incoming ships brought the Spanish flu epidemic to Anyox. Charles Clarkson Rhodes, the Chief Accountant for the Granby Consolidated operations in Anyox, died on October 29, 1918, while he was helping to treat patients in the Anyox Hospital. Dozens of workers and residents of Anyox died from the flu epidemic. In the early 1920s, the concrete pioneer and dam engineer John S. Eastwood designed a

hydroelectric Hydroelectricity, or hydroelectric power, is Electricity generation, electricity generated from hydropower (water power). Hydropower supplies 15% of the world's electricity, almost 4,210 TWh in 2023, which is more than all other Renewable energ ...

dam, which, at high, was the tallest dam in Canada for many years. Anyox was partially destroyed by forest fires in 1923, but the townsite was rebuilt, and mining operations continued.

Acid rain Acid rain is rain or any other form of Precipitation (meteorology), precipitation that is unusually acidic, meaning that it has elevated levels of hydrogen ions (low pH). Most water, including drinking water, has a neutral pH that exists b ...

from the smelter denuded trees on nearby hillsides, which became bare. The

Great Depression The Great Depression was a severe global economic downturn from 1929 to 1939. The period was characterized by high rates of unemployment and poverty, drastic reductions in industrial production and international trade, and widespread bank and ...

drove down the demand for copper. This was effectively the beginning of the end for Anyox. Operations continued but were steadily scaled down while the company stockpiled of copper, three years of production, which it was unable to sell. The mine shut down in 1935, and the town was abandoned. Salvage operations in the 1940s removed most machinery and steel from the town, and two forest fires, in 1942 and 1943, burned all of the remaining wood structures. During its 25 year existence, Anyox's mines and smelters produced of gold, of silver and of copper.

Ongoing developments

Active mineral exploration continues in the area. In the 1980s, local entrepreneurs teamed with Vancouver investors to purchase the long dormant operations from the owner of record. Whenever there is a rise in the price of copper, there is speculation about the possibility of re-development, but none has ever occurred. Since 2000, the current owners have been trying to attract interest in rehabilitating the hydroelectric dam to supply the British Columbia grid or to attract and serve an on-site natural gas liquefaction facility. The town was the subject of the 2022 documentary film '' Anyox''.

Notable residents

Former Vancouver Mayor Jack Volrich was one of the 351 people born in Anyox, as was Thomas Waterland, MLA for Yale-Lillooet from 1975 to 1986. Reid Mitchell, who represented Canada in basketball at the 1948 Olympics, was also born in Anyox. Denny Boyd, a

Vancouver Sun The ''Vancouver Sun'', also known as the ''Sun'', is a daily broadsheet newspaper based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The newspaper is currently published by the Pacific Newspaper Group, a division of Postmedia Network, and is the larg ...

reporter and Order of British Columbia recipient.

References

External links