Tokeen on Marble Island
Long ago, Southeast Alaska Indian children played with dolls that had marble heads. Their parents had probably painstakingly chiseled the marble from deposits near Prince of Wales Island (near today's Ketchikan). In 1909, steam-powered machinery provided an easier way to remove the stone, and a new industry was born.
One of the best known marble quarries was at Tokeen on Marble Island, off the west coast of Prince of Wales Island. Blocks of marble, some weighing as much as 11 tons, were quarried from the island and loaded onto flat cars. The gravity-operated cars traveled down narrow-gauge track to the beach, where the marble was loaded on barges for shipment to the Vermont Marble Company mill at Tacoma. There the stone was sawed and polished for use in buildings throughout the Northwest. Because of the high shipping costs, very little of the polished Tokeen marble was ever returned to Alaska. An exception is the marble used in the state capitol at Juneau, which has four pillars and much interior trim of Tokeen marble.
At the peak of marble production, there were eight quarries employing 70 workers at Tokeen. The workers lived in bunkhouses, took their meals in the company dining hall, and worked six days a week for nine months of the year. The quarries yielded more than $2.5 million in marble before the operation ended in 1927. Most of the buildings at Tokeen have rotted away now, and the quarries are filled with water. In fact, one of the quarries served as a marble-lined swimming pool for loggers who harvested timber near the site half a century after the last block of marble had been carried away. [url]http://www.akhistorycourse.org/articles/article.php?artID=79[/url]