Digital Bob Archive

The Cemetery Road, now known as Calhoun Avenue, was first a narrow cart track carved out of the steep western slope of Bonanza Ridge in 1891. Essentially, the first road was a widening of a footpath that had served the residents of several cabins and houses that had been built along the hillside. Main purpose of the Cemetery Road was to provide access to the newly established Evergreen Cemetery, and it was built by volunteer labor under the direction of the Evergreen Cemetery Association. Since 1891 and right up to 1988 the thoroughfare has undergone a continuing program of repair and improvement, first by the Cemetery Association, then after 1900 by the City of Juneau.

The road had barely been completed, in 1891, when the first repairs became necessary. Gold Creek went on one of its frequent fall rampages and took out a portion of the road. And although the rushing waters did not damage the bridge across the creek, they did undermine a big spruce tree that crashed down across the bridge, demolishing it.

It is uncertain who built the first house on what is now Calhoun Avenue; it may have been Louis Littlepage Williams who in 1886 came here from Boonsville, Missouri, to become Juneau's U.S. Commissioner under Judge Lafayette Dawson. He built a house close to present Calhoun Avenue and somewhere between 8th and 10th Streets. That area became known as Williamstown. In 1894 Williams was appointed U.S. Marshal for Alaska and moved to Sitka. He returned here in 1897 and built two houses on the northwest corner of Fourth and Gold Streets and lived in one of them until he returned to Missouri in 1908.

Another federal official who arrived in Juneau in the mid-1880s was Dr. F.S. Reynolds, deputy Collector of Customs. He stayed in that office only a couple of years, then dabbled in mining at Sheep Creek, started a dairy on the edge of Gold Creek in the vicinity of the present intersection of Capitol Avenue and 11th Street, and practiced medicine from an office on Seward Street. In 1888 Reynolds sent to Wisconsin for his sister and brother-in-law, Mary and John J. Calhoun. He was a veteran of the Civil War and a member of the Grand Army of the Republic. In 1889 The Juneau City Mining Record reported that Calhoun was building a residence \"on the western edge of Juneau near the ranch of his brother-in-law.\" By then he was managing the dairy and later he purchased it.

A couple of years later, about the time the Cemetery Road was being built, Calhoun came into conflict with the local school board over some property on that road. Dr. Sheldon Jackson, the Special Agent of Education for Alaska, had set up a local advisory school board in each town, and when the Juneau school building became overcrowded the local board picked a site for a new school building for Native pupils. This was Block 32, the block now occupied by the Governor's House. The school board won the contest and a little white school building for Natives was put up in that block on the Cemetery Road in 1894.