Kåfjord Copper Works

[4] Crowe and Woodfall both acted as directors of the company in Kåfjord, which changed its name to Alten Copper Works after some time.

Instead, the ore was sent to the United Kingdom for smelting, with the stipulation that the crude material be crushed and carefully sorted in advance so as not to transport too much stone in relation to copper.

As the co-director of the Alten Copper Works, Woodfall was skeptical of Crowe's proposal to select miners from England to operate the mine in Alta.

Woodfall and Crowe eventually concluded that it was too expensive to use English workers, and six of them were returned to Cornwall in September 1827.

Suggestions were later made to bring back English professionals, but Woodfall remained opposed to imported labor.

Under these circumstances, the company would also have to pay the travel expenses for the workers' families, but Woodfall considered this a necessary long-term investment to establish a permanent mining community in Kåfjord.

In this way, there would be better prospects for the workers to remain in Kåfjord, and the local labor force would increase in the long run.

For the same reason, Woodfall primarily wanted to hire workers that had no debt to repay at their previous residence; many people sought work at Kåfjord only to make money to pay off their farms at home and they would return to their farms as soon as they had become debt free.

Crowe and Woodfall brought the philanthropic factory tradition from their homeland, which involved not only putting people to work but also ensuring their welfare.

They took care of widows of factory workers and their families, and in Kåfjord they built a small industrial community based on the English model with their own homes and a health center for the employees.

[14] In the works' civic building, Ultima Thule was founded as the world's northernmost theater company, with seating for 200 people, in 1840.

The building also contained a library with a reading rooms for the workers, with everything from classical literature to new journals on science and technology.

[17] However, copper prices fell on the world market, and the Quenangen Mining Association, which had been launched in 1827 by John Rice Crowe, was increasingly experiencing economic problems.

[18] Thomas left Alten Copper Mines in 1857, when he went to Chile to become director general of the Copiapo Smelting Company.

The smelting hut was torn down and an electric power station was set up on the Møllnes River (Møllneselva) in 1903.