By 1911, the Cordova Mines had been idle for eight years. A new company, known as Cordova Gold Mines Limited was formed for the expressed purposed of purchasing and redeveloping the mines. Based in Toronto, and comprised of both Canadian and American officers from Toronto and upstate New York, the company proposed to raise $2,000,000 by selling four million shares at a price of 50 cents each.
In order to attract investors, Cordova Gold Mines Limited
produced a small publication - kind of a current day
IPO - which is extremely rich in detail. The publication
includes a description of the town site, specifics on
available road and rail transportation, engineering
reports, drawings, recommendations for improvements
and upgrades, profit projections as well as the delightful
bonus of several dozen photos of the town, mines and
surrounding worker's village.
This content was far too extensive to include in our
regular ghost towns format and rightfully deserved a
place of its own. Rather than including the entire booklet,
we've built a mini site around the photographs and included
details and excerpts wherever they seemed appropriate.
The excerpts are written in the actual text as it appeared in the
publication, complete with the phrasing and elaborate
grammatical and punctuation conventions that were common
during that time.
We've tried to structure this site in a way that is
similar to an actual publication. The pages have been
deliberately kept small with 'next' or page turns at
the bottom of each page. Rather than a menu, we've included
a 'table of contents'.
The original publication belongs to Ron Barrons who
was gracious enough to take the time and trouble to
scan and e-mail almost the entire contents. We'd especially
like to thank Ron for sharing this wonderful and rare
piece of history with everyone. We hope you enjoy it.
NOTE: We should point out that one of our visitors with a very keen eye noticed a number of errors and other discrepancies in the publication. Apart from one of them (an upside down photo) the content has been left intact as it was originally published.
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