Holden Village, Washington records, 1996-2001

Holden Village was an abandoned mining village turned Lutheran Christian center in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington. The village is located equal distance from Seattle and Spokane and was a mining townsite before being abandoned from 1957 to 1961 when a group of forty people from the Lutheran Church spent a month converting it into the center it is today.

The valley has existed for millennia and was carved out by glaciers and defined by Indigenous people before white settler miners repurposed it for commercial use. The region is the ancestral lands of the Chelan, the Entiat, the P’Squosa, the Wenatchi-Colville and the Wenatchi-Yakama Tribal Nations.

The Holden Mine was a successful copper mine starting in 1937 with many of the miners bringing their families to the town while they worked there. The Holden townsite was built on the north side of Railroad Creek by the Howe Sound Company, which owned the mine, to accommodate the growing population. Both the mine and townsite were abandoned in 1957 when the mine was closed due to diminished resources and dropping metal prices from WWII.

The Howe Sound Company originally set the property’s price at $100,000 but it did not sell. The company was then persuaded to gift the area to the Lutheran Church in 1960 at the request of Wes Prieb. Prieb was a member of the Lutheran Bible Institute who saw the mine as a potential spiritual retreat. In summer 1961 volunteers from the church worked to restore the buildings of the townsite and the village ran as a retreat center during the summers before converting to year-round.