Digital Bob Archive

When John Muir was paddled down Gastineau Channel in a dugout canoe in the fall of 1879, he observed a summer fish camp at the mouth of Gold Creek but no signs of a winter village. Within a year, however, gold was found on the upper reaches of the creek and before long a settlement was getting started. The first settlers were white miners who came in the fall of 1880 and during the winter following. The next spring some of them brought their wives to the new camp, and about the same time a few Native families moved in from Auke Bay and Youngs Bay and Taku Harbor and elsewhere.

Who was the first woman to become a resident of Juneau? If it was a Native, her identity has unfortunately been lost. If that first resident was white, probably the honor was shared by English born Elizabeth Sellers Prior and her daughter, Lila, then nine years old. The husband and father, Cornishman John Prior, had brought his family north in 1879 to Sitka where he worked at the Stewart Mine. He arrived on Gastineau Channel from Sitka in a dugout canoe in December, 1880, and with others did placer mining on Ready Bullion Beach that winter.

In Juneau the Prior family first lived in a cabin on a Third Street site now occupied by the Community and Regional Affairs building, then moved to another cabin where the Juneau Memorial Library now stands. That cabin was replaced by a frame dwelling and Mrs. Prior lived there until her death in August, 1921.

Lila Prior, who was born in Grass Valley, California, had just passed her fourteenth birthday in 1886 when she married John Olds, a Cornishman and a miner like her father. Olds built the large dwelling that stands immediately behind the Juneau Memorial Library and he and Lila had five children. He died in 1910 and Lila married Dr. A.J. Palmer in 1917 and continued to live in Juneau until her death in March 1939.

The second white woman to become a resident of Juneau was said to have been Mrs. George Pilz whose husband, a German-born mining engineer who had been working at Silver Bay near Sitka, sent Joe Juneau and Dick Harris to prospect in this area. Pilz had been operating the old Russian sawmill at Sitka and he cut all the lumber for a house; cut it to exact size, shipped it to Juneau and had it erected at the corner of Front and Main Streets. It was said to have been the first frame building in Juneau, but the Pilz family lived in it for only a year or so before they left Juneau.

The first woman to own real property in Juneau seems to have been Mrs. Delila Alexander, the wife of George Alexander. There may have been opposition to her ownership; the minutes of a miners' meeting on March 28, 1881, simply state:
\"Motion that Mrs. Alexander's right to locate a town lot be recognized. Carried.\" The miners were meeting in the Alexander home, which may have made a difference. She located the lot at the corner of Third and Seward where the Shattuck Building now stands, but sold it in October, 1883, for $12.50.