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Cordova, Alaska Virtual Visit

Cordova is located on the southern coast of Alaska. Construction of what would become the Copper River & Northwestern Railway, built to provide access to the recently-discovered copper lodes at Kennecott, 196 miles inland from Cordova, was begun in 1906. Michael J. Henley, who had recently completed the White Pass & Yukon Railroad to serve the Klondike gold rush, chose a terminus location on Orca Inlet off the Gulf of Alaska, near the native village of Eyak. Henley named the new town which sprung up around his construction headquarters “Cordova,” from the original name given the bay by the Spanish explorer Salvador Fidalgo in 1790.

Visiting Eyak in 1907, Episcopal missionary the Rev. E. P. Newton realized the pressing need for a social hall to serve the hundreds of construction and railway workers. Thus construction of the one-room, wood frame building known as the Red Dragon Club House was begun the following summer. Opening on 14 July 1908, the Red Dragon was the second completed building in the new Cordova town site, and soon became the town’s center of social activities, hosting events such as dances, theatrical performances, ice cream socials, boxing matches, and, on Sundays, church services and Sunday school. Open daily until midnight, the club house offered comfortable chairs, a large stone fireplace at the west end, a piano, a pool table, and a 600-volume library.

The adjacent St. George’s Episcopal Church was dedicated on Easter Sunday, 20 April 1919. The design of the church is attributed to the Rev. Eustace P. Ziegler, who had trained as an artist in Detroit before relocating to Cordova in 1909. St. George’s was dedicated to the memory of Erastus Hawkins, Chief Engineer of the Copper River & Northwestern Railway, and funded in part by a large contribution from the Kennecott Copper Corporation. The church was built of wood frame construction on a concrete foundation, and sided with shingles on the exterior. The interior was sheathed with plywood panels and battens, stained dark brown.

In the mid-1940s, following the decline in Cordova’s economy precipitated by the closure of the Kennecott mines in 1938, the Red Dragon was remodeled to serve as a rectory for the church. At some point in the mid-twentieth century, both a kitchen and bathroom were installed and, with the establishment of a public library in Cordova, the bookshelves and books were removed. Following a fire in the late 1950s, the stone fireplace was removed.

Threatened with demolition by the State Highway Department in 1964, Cordovans rallied to save their oldest standing building, and in 1982 the Red Dragon, together with St. George’s, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places as the centerpiece of the Red Dragon Historic District. Today St. George’s and the Red Dragon continue to play a vital role in Cordova, providing social services and serving as important community gathering places.

Project Information

Heritage Documentation Programs (HDP) carried out Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) documentation of the Red Dragon and St. George's Episcopal Church in 2014. The project was sponsored by the National Park Service's Alaska Regional Office. HDP architects Jeremy T. Mauro, John Wachtel, and Mark Schara captured data using a combination of traditional hand measuring together with high-definition surveying. A Leica Scanstation C10 3-D laser scanner was used to create the point cloud, rendered with applied panophotographs in Leica Cyclone. The fly-through animation of the point cloud was executed in Pointools by Jeremy T. Mauro.

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Last updated: October 31, 2023