Britannia Mines Concentrator National Historic Site

Mining B.C.'s past

For almost 70 years the Britannia mines were an important producer of copper ore and during the 1920s and 1930s they constituted one of the largest mining operations in Canada. Britannia began producing ore in 1905 but did not become a significant operation until after 1912 when a second concentrator was built. The present gravity-fed concentrator, completed in 1923, was highly innovative, as, for example, in the use of bulk flotation. By 1912 both mill and mine towns had been established to house men and families of a permanent racially-mixed work force that numbered over 1,000 in 1929. The mines closed in 1974.