Shasta County Copper Towns

Placer gold first attracted adventures to the northern mines after its discovery in Shasta County in 1848, but almost immediately, valuable deposits of copper were also noted. Copper production remained idle until the Mountain Copper Company acquired Iron Mountain in 1896. British and eastern financiers such as Guggenheim and Rothschild saw the potential in the unique combination of high-grade copper ore, a functioning railway, and vast quantities of limestone and quartz for flux, and they ...