Riddle: The Only Nickel Smelter in America

Riddle was named for John B. Riddle, whose family staked one of the first land claims in the Cow Creek Valley back in eighteen fifty-one. The town incorporated in eighteen ninety-three, mostly a timber and farming community.

But hidden in the hills above town was a deposit that would eventually make Riddle unique in the entire United States. Sheepherders had noticed strange green rock on Nickel Mountain in eighteen sixty-four, and mining attempts followed, but it was the Korean War that changed everything. The federal government realized the country had no domestic nickel production at all.

So Washington subsidized the Hanna Nickel Company, which opened the only nickel smelter in the United States right here in nineteen fifty-four, employing roughly seven hundred people. The smelter ran until nineteen ninety-eight, when imports made it uneconomical to operate.