Digital Bob Archive

Local place names in any town or city are always interesting, and for a number of reasons. For one, their origins are often elusive; for another, unless officially adopted, as for the name of a street, they tend to have life cycles. A name will come into use for a number of years, then disappear, to be found only in old documents and yellowing newspapers.

Juneau has several local place names, and had more of them in years past.
Chicken Ridge is a name that got its start early in the town's history, migrated from one location to another, and for some time has been fading from everyday usage.

Who thought up the name can't be pinned down now, but it first appeared in writing in a property deed in June, 1881. For $70 R.G. Willoughby bought from Frank Starr a fraction of a town lot that was described as \"west of Main Street, under the point of Chicken Ridge.\" Was it Frank Starr who came up with the name Chicken Ridge for what is now commonly known as Telephone Hill? Or was it Dick Willoughby? Or, in June, 1881, was the name already in common use among the miners who made up most of the population?

At any rate, Dick Willoughby built his cabin on that piece of ground, at the north end of the present city parking lot, and it may have been the proximity of his cabin that caused his name to be affixed to a new street in 1914.

The name Chicken Ridge, according to one plausible theory, arose from the prevalence of ptarmigan on the hill. But that name was not universally accepted in 1881. J.D. Sagemiller and Stillman Lewis, in claiming town lots, called it Telegraph Hill. Both men had mined in California and may have been thinking of San Francisco's Telegraph Hill. The Rev. S. Hall Young, however, on May 3, 1881, claimed a lot on the hill \"for church and school purposes\" and called it Knob Hill.

The most recent known legal instrument pinning the name Chicken Ridge to present Telephone Hill was dated in March, 1896, but in the meantime on May 28, 1890, Pat McGlinchy, Charles Forrest, John F. Malony, L.L. Williams and Alfred H. Gamel staked five placer claims on what they called Chicken Ridge. Further descriptions show that the claims were along Seventh Street. It is not known whether the five found any gold in their claims, but they did firmly affix the name Chicken Ridge to that area.

On April 22, 1895, The Juneau City Mining Record said: \"Residents of Chicken Ridge are agitating the question of changing the name of the Nob Hill of Juneau into one a little more euphonious. Chicken Ridge is a most expressive pseudonym which in the palmy mining days of Juneau was particularly appropriate, but now that we are fast assuming metropolitan airs, why not change it to something less suggestive of the wild and wooly?\"

It is not possible to determine from that item, or from any other writing yet discovered, whether it was the Telephone Hill people or the dwellers up toward Seventh Street who were unhappy. If the latter, they were pretty much stuck with Chicken Ridge although today, more than 90 years later, it is gradually drifting out of use.