Digital Bob Archive

Gold mines and salmon canneries were the reasons for establishing most of the approximately forty post offices that were served by mail boats operating from Juneau. Not all of those offices existed at the same time, and some of them were very short lived, but all of them marked some expansion of the Juneau trading area.

The month of March, 1890, brought two new post offices to the Lynn Canal area.
The first was Chilkat on the east side of the inlet of the same name and not far from Haines Mission. Three canneries were built there, in 1883, 1889 and 1902.
The post office was at the second cannery, with its superintendent as the first postmaster. The second office was Berners, a mining camp. The exact location is unknown but it may have been a short distance north of Point Sherman, on the east side of Lynn Canal, at what was later known at various times as Seward City, Nowell City and Comet. John McLaughlin, an early prospector in the area, was the first and only postmaster. The office was closed after a couple of years, probably because nobody wanted to be bothered with running it. It was not because of lack of local activity; the Berners Bay district was swarming with prospectors and miners in those years.

A man identified only as Indian Johnson had the first contract to carry the mail from Juneau to Chilkat, with a stop at Berners while that office existed. He was required to make one round trip each month, leaving Juneau after the arrival of the mail steamer from Port Townsend. Johnson was said to have served the route with a dugout canoe.

R.S. Smith of Portland, Oregon, next got the contract on a bid of $727 a year, which a Juneau newspaper called \"far too low.\" Smith put a small schooner, the Nellie Martin, on the run, but after a year or so the contract was cancelled and new bids were called for an expanded route. This one required two trips a month - one after each mail steamer - with calls at Berners Bay, Seward City, Chilkat and Dyea. The Berners Bay stop was probably at the mining camp that soon became known as Jualin, although it did not become a post office until 1901. And Seward City did not have a post office until its name was changed to Comet in 1901.

Dyea, at what had formerly been known as Yukon Portage and then as Healy's Trading Post, at the extreme head of Lynn Canal, became a post office in July, 1896. Each year several hundred men had been going through Dyea and over Chilkoot Pass to the Yukon headwaters and the number increased drastically after word got out of a new gold discovery on Birch Creek. That discovery resulted in the building of Circle City in 1896. It soon became the largest community in the Yukon Valley, and its residents demanded mail service. Bids were called for carrying the mail from Juneau to Circle on four round trips between November and May, and two Juneau men, Frank Corwin and Albert Hayes, got the contract.