John Munro Longyear

Who is John Munro Longyear?

John Munro Longyear was an American businessman from Michigan who built his fortune identifying and developing iron-ore and timber properties in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Minnesota. He first visited Spitsbergen as a tourist in 1901 and returned in 1903, when a meeting with local prospector Henrik B. Næss in Adventfjorden convinced him of the archipelago's coal potential. In 1906 Longyear founded the Arctic Coal Company with his business partner Frederick Ayer, headquartered in Boston, and began building a mining settlement on the shore of Adventfjorden capable of housing several hundred workers through the brutal Arctic winters. That settlement, known as Longyear City, grew into the town now called Longyearbyen, today the administrative center and largest settlement in Svalbard. Longyear sold the company's Spitsbergen holdings to a consortium of Norwegian investors, Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani, in 1916, but the town, along with a nearby river and valley, has carried his name ever since, and Longyearbyen remains the seat of the Governor of Svalbard.

Sources: Wikipedia, "John Munro Longyear" · Svalbard Museum, "Longyearbyen" · Historical Marker Database (hmdb.org), "The town's founder John Munro Longyear"