Digital Bob Archive

Captain Charles Edward Tibbits was the leader of the three men who organized the Juneau Ferry & Navigation Company in December, 1894, and the only one of the three who stayed with it for very long. One of the others was Captain James Blaine and in 1896 he was appointed a deputy U.S. Marshal at Unalaska and sold his interest in the ferry company to S.M. Graff.

The third man was Oliver Fontaine who had been in Alaska since the time of the flag-raising at Sitka. For some years he had operated a sawmill at Shakan on Kosciusco Island and Fontaine Island in that area was named for him. By the late 1880s he was running a sawmill at the mouth of Sheep Creek and logging on Admiralty Island, which was where Lieut.-Commander Mansfield found him in 1890 while surveying with the steamer Patterson. Mansfield named Oliver Inlet for Fontaine.

One of the things Fontaine contributed to the ferry company was the use of the Seaolin which he had helped convert from sail to steam and which was for many years a part of the Juneau small boat fleet. After a year or so Fontaine sold his interest in the Juneau Ferry & Navigation Company to F.D. Nowell, a member of the family that had numerous local mining interests. At that time Nowell, Graff and Tibbits owned the ferry company with Tibbits as the manager.

Tibbits had arrived in Juneau in the early 1880s and on May 24, 1885, married Platoneda Korhonen whose father had arrived in Sitka from Finland in 1861 and worked for the Russian American Company. Platoneda, sometimes known as Neadi, had just passed her 13th birthday when she married Tibbits. He worked at various jobs, including the manqgement of the People's Wharf, before he got into the ferry business in 1894.

As did many other Juneau men, Tibbits took a brief fling at the Klondike in 1897, working a claim on Bonanza Creek with a partner. He retained his interest in the ferry company, however, and soon returned to it. That same year, 1897, two Treadwell men bought a half interest in the Juneau Ferry & Navigation Company and did much to shape its future.

The two were Robert Duncan, Jr., superintendent of the Treadwell mines, and his assistant, A.W. Corbus. They, with J.P. Corbus and John F. Malony, a Juneau lawyer, had purchased the Alaska Electric Light & Power Company the previous year from its founder, Willis Thorp. Thereafter the two companies were closely associated and shared office space in Juneau. In time the manager of the power company also served as manager of the ferry company.

Tibbits remained with the company and served as boat skipper until about 1920 when he left it and for the next seven years ran vessels of the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. When he retired from that he bought Billy Taylor's candy shop at Third and Main Streets - the early day location of China Joe's bakery - and operated it until the summer of 1931. He died at Juneau on October 5 of that year.