The 6 city blocks where the CopperLine Lodge was originally built was deeded to its original owner in 1946. The 30’x30’ Lodge proper was put together, log by log, in 1954 with a first floor kitchen and guest room that took up half of the ground floor, a meeting room that occupied the other half, and four evenly divided upstairs guest rooms that shared two bathrooms. Proof of the time frame is written on the second course of logs on the east wall in Gathering Room where it says in legible pencil, “Dorothy Wyers peeled this log August 1954.” (See photo)
Originally called “The Sportman’s Lodge,” the Wyers family operated it as a small hotel until they sold it to George Storer, founder of the Old Baldy Golf Club in 1963. Before that sale in 1960, the Wyers built the east wing with four more guest rooms and the west wing with three. After the sale to Old Baldy, ground crew workers and cooks who worked at the Club stayed in the Lodge until 2015—53 years—when the present owner, Dan Pont, a long time Marriage & Family Therapist with an interest in restoring old residences, purchased the property and began returning the Lodge to its original purpose.
Ferris-Haggerty Mine
Edison’s light bulb began commercial production in 1880, and the need for copper exploded over the next 20 years. Telegraph and telephone transmission lines also converted from steel to copper wire and contributed to the need for copper. So Ed Haggerty and George Ferris teamed up with investors and began exploiting a rich deposit of copper ore in the Sierra Madre Range in southern Carbon County, about 20 miles south of the today's CopperLine Lodge starting in 1897.
The roads were crude and often impassible with mud and snow in colder months, and rains in the summer often made the mine site inaccessible. So they built a tramway--16 miles of towers with baskets to carry the copper ore suspended on cable between the towers to move it from the mine in the mountains to the smelter in Encampment. Ore transit also included 4 miles of pipeline from the mine site to first tower where the baskets were loaded, and one stretch of the tram-line that crested the Continental Divide. My name for that engineering marvel: The CopperLine.