Digital Bob Archive

The Calhoun dairy ranch was on Gold Creek just below the present Calhoun Avenue bridge and the dairy cows foraged on what was known as Calhoun's Flats, between Gold Creek and Evergreen Cemetery. The road from town to the cemetery, known simply as the Cemetery Road in its early years, became Calhoun Avenue after Mr. and Mrs. Calhoun left Juneau in 1902. It was reportedly named for Mrs. Mary Reynolds Calhoun. Two Calhoun daughters were married in Juneau: Ellen to Frank Bach in 1889, Leonora to Edward Webster in 1892. The two men became partners in establishing the Juneau and Douglas Telephone Company. Two Calhoun sons appear not to have spent much time in Juneau. At the turn of the century they were mining in Nevada.

Calhoun may have closed the dairy before he and Mrs. Calhoun moved to Seattle in October, 1902. He sold the ranch property to W.W. Casey and Henry Shattuck and it eventually became the Casey-Shattuck Addition to the City of Juneau. In 1902, however, there was little demand for building lots that far out of town. There was a demand for a place to play baseball and football, and in May, 1903, crews of volunteers began to blast out stumps and grade Calhoun's Flats for a recreation park. The first baseball game was played there on Sunday, June 14, 1903, when the Juneau Tigers defeated a team from Douglas, 14-3. Soon after that a grandstand seating 400 people was erected at \"the park.\" Games were played there through the summer of 1912. It was then announced that the property would be subdivided and placed on sale, and a new ball park was built - again by volunteer labor - in Last Chance Basin. Until 1914 when Willoughby Avenue was built as a planked street on piling, Calhoun Avenue was the only route from town to the growing suburbs to the north. A 1908 plat shows Calhoun Avenue ending at the top of the hill above the bridge. From there a stairway went down to the head of Tenth Street and the road across the bridge and through Evergreen Cemetery was marked \"wagon road to the bar.\" It is now Irwin Street and the \"road to the bar\" is Glacier Avenue and Glacier Highway.

At the turn of the century one resident described what was then the Cemetery Road as \"twisting and winding along the hillside with many humps and bumps.\" With the increasing traffic, there were demands that the new City of Juneau, incorporated in 1900, make some improvements. The first of these was \"a planked street on posts around the bend below Behrend's residence\" at Fifth Street. At the other end, where Gold Belt joins Calhoun, the hill was cut back to widen the roadway to 20 feet.

At least some of the \"humps\" were created by solid rock that had to be blasted away. One ridge of rock crossed the street between Fourth and Fifth. Blasting lowered the grade by eight feet in that area; some of the bedrock is still visible on the upland side of the street near the library. Blasting was also required opposite School No.2 where the Governor's House now stands, and perhaps in other places.