During its roughly 40-year lifespan, the Alaska Treadwell Gold Mining Company pulled almost $70 million worth of gold out of the earth beneath Douglas Island. Now, nearly 100 years after the mine closed, it’s still generating income — only in the form of grants rather than gold.
On Tuesday, the Treadwell Historic Preservation and Restoration Society Inc. received a $5,000 grant from the Avista Foundation, a nonprofit organization established by Washington-based energy company Avista Corp. Avista Corp. is the owner of Alaska Electric, Light & Power Co.
Paulette Simpson, the historical society’s president, said that the grant will help with the rehabilitation of the Treadwell Office Building, one of only two structures that remain from the mining operation.
“It’s a mining history project to tell the story of Treadwell,” Simpson told the Empire in a phone interview Tuesday. “I knew the foundation had given $10K to the Seward statue, and I thought this was right down their alley.”
The office building and the historic Treadwell Mine Salt Water Pump House — the tall, concrete and iconic building at Sandy Beach on Douglas — were the only two buildings to survive a 1926 fire that wiped out nearly 200 other buildings tied to the Treadwell operation. Though the office building survived the fire, time has taken its toll on the building, which is now a ruin.
By Simpson’s estimate, it will cost $450,000 to rehabilitate the office building. With the Avista grant, the Treadwell society has a little more than $262,000 in hand or committed to its goal. The society has already spent $25,000 on its initial engineering report for the project, and Simpson said the next step is to put a new roof on the structure. If all goes well, she hopes to have the building reroofed by this fall.
“Pieces of the roof have been flying off in the wind,” she said describing the building’s current condition. “It’s gotten to be dangerous, so we were hoping to get that off in October.”
The project will also entail removing the second-story floor of the building to turn it into an open-air shelter, like the two picnic shelters on Sandy Beach. The group is still waiting to find out whether it will receive a sizable grant — how much, Simpson didn’t want to say — from the Rasmuson Foundation. She expects to hear from the Rasumuson Foundation sometime next month.
The Avista Foundation grant was one of about two dozen awarded by the foundation this year. The foundation awarded most of the grants — $41,500 of the total $72,500 — to Washington-based organizations. The foundation also gave grants to groups in Idaho, Oregon and Montana. The Treadwell grant was the only one awarded in Alaska.
Avista Spokesperson Jessie Wuerst said that the foundation was created in 2002 “as a way to consistently provide support to nonprofit organizations in the communities where we are.”
Since then, the Avista Foundation has awarded almost $4 million in grants, she said. This year, more than 100 organizations applied for grants. The Avista Foundation’s board ultimately decides who wins grants and in what amount. AEL&P Company President Tim McLeod and Dennis Vermillion, chairman of AEL&P’s board of directors, both sit on the Avista Foundation’s board.
Simpson said that she had originally asked for a grant of $25,000, but she was happy with the outcome.
“With these things, you have shoot for the moon and hope that they give you something,” she said.
• Contact reporter Sam DeGrave at 523-2279 or sam.degrave@juneauempire.com.
