Swanberg's Dredge
Alaska
This rusting steel hulk sitting in a pond just east of Nome is a gold dredge, a floating machine that chewed through sand and gravel to wash out gold. It was built in San Francisco, shipped north, and put to work in nineteen forty-six by a miner named Walter Johnson. But the math never worked.
The cost of building and hauling it across the ocean was so high, against the fixed price of gold, that Johnson ran it for a single season before a local bank seized it. It takes its name from Nelson Swanberg, who owned it years later and turned it into a tourist attraction. Nome's beaches and streams gave up more than three and a half million ounces of gold over the decades, and this dredge is one of the last great relics of that rush.
It joined the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand one.
