Kusye-Aleksandrovsky

The works and its settlement were founded by the Stroganovs in 1751 at the mouth of the small Kusya river where it joins the Koyva — the name combining the river and that of the founder, industrialist Alexander Grigoryevich Stroganov. The works only smelted pig iron: it went for conversion along the Chusovaya and the Kama, and after the Lysva works was built in 1785, by barge down the Koyva and by cart along the Kusya road. The owners changed from the Stroganovs to the Golitsyn and Shakhovskoy princes, then to the Butero-Rodali, but the settlement lived by the works into the twentieth century. Today it is a half-alive place of some fifteen hundred people: quiet streets, the works' story in every second house, and its chief sight — the old dam on the Kusya, which locals call a waterfall. All around is mountainous wooded wilderness: the Koyva winds in backwaters and islands, and on the northern bank stand the Bogatsky Kamen and Grebeshki rocks. Fishermen, painters and lovers of ironworks history find here what the rebuilt museum villages cannot offer: the genuine, unvarnished Urals.