Digital Bob Archive

Making lumber the hard way, with whipsaws, was one of the main occupations of the miners who camped in what is now downtown Juneau in the winter of 1880-81. The boards they cut would be needed, when the snow went off, to build sluice boxes on their placer claims in the Gold Creek Valley.

Despite that early start in the lumber business, it would be some years before Juneau began its more than six decades as a sawmill town. In the meanwhile, the first sawmill on Gastineau Channel was built at the mouth of Sheep Creek and it was followed by one on Douglas Island.

Juneau's first sawmill was right down town, on Front Street on the present site of Lyle's Hardware and Furniture store. Front Street was the waterfront in 1894 when James P. Jorgenson leased the former Sitka Trading Company store building on the present site of Lyle's Hardware and Furniture. Jorgenson had come to Juneau in 1885 and set up as a carpenter and builder. In 1894 he began to stock building hardware in the leased building and the following year he added lumber, most of which he shipped in from Shakan where a sawmill had operated for several years.

Jorgenson next bought the building; although, at that time, he could not get title to the beach under it. In 1897 he replaced the old store building with a new one, and behind it he put up two buildings. One, measuring 30 by 70 feet, was to house a sawmill; the other, 48 by 70, soon contained a planning mill and machinery for turning out sash and doors and moulding.

There appear to be no production records for Jorgenson's original sawmill, but it was profitable enough that in 1902 he decided to expand it and looked for a site. His first choice was beside Juneau's original wharf, on what was then the south edge of town. The Pacific Coast Steamship Company blocked that when it claimed ownership of the site. Jorgenson moved farther south to approximately the present Juneau ferry terminal site. It was next door to Willis Thorp's cattle yard and slaughter house, both of which had not been used for those purposes for several years. Jorgenson began driving piling on that site at the end of April, 1902. No start-up date for Juneau's first full-scale sawmill has been found, but by the end of July, 1902, it was reported to be cutting 30,000 feet of lumber a day.

In its October-November, 1907, issue, The Alaska Monthly Magazine reported that the Jorgenson sawmill had a payroll of $1500 a month and paid an average of $4500 a month for logs. It seems doubtful that the mill operated the year around, but even so the mill was a considerable asset to Juneau. Wages in the mines around Juneau at that time ran from $3 to $4.50 a day, and sawmill wages probably ran about the same. That adds up to a payroll of around 15 men, aside from those employed in logging. At that time the two big gold mines on the Juneau side of Gastineau Channel were still in the future, and in 1910 the town's population was 1644 as compared to 1722 at Douglas and 1222 at Treadwell. The Jorgenson mill payroll equaled that of several of the lode mines in the Gold production Creek Valley.