Digital Bob Archive

The Juneau Lumber Mills, Inc., a new corporation, early in 1919 replaced the Worthen Lumber Mills as the owner of the sawmill on the southern edge of downtown Juneau. The change came as a result of the death, in a mill accident, of H.S. Worthen in June, 1918. The mill had continued to operate under E.E. Smith, Worthen's nephew, but the Worthen family was anxious to find a buyer for his interest. Henry Shattuck, who had purchased the original Jorgenson sawmill in 1911, still held an interest but in 1918 he was producing airplane spruce in a mill at Craig. That fall he began seeking a buyer for a major interest in the Juneau mill which according to a published estimate was worth $200,000, including the mill, boats, and lumber and log inventories.

The buyer he found was Roy Agusieus Rutherford, 43, a native of Ohio who had moved to Washington Territory with his family and had grown up in timber country. He had come north to Valdez in 1901 and later moved to the new mining camp of Fairbanks where he eventually purchased the Noyes sawmill. He still owned it in 1919 and operated it as the Independent Lumber Company.

Rutherford bought the interests of the Worthen estate and of C.H. Black, a Seattle man who had invested in 1913 with Worthen. The new company was incorporated for $60,000 with Rutherford as president and manager and Shattuck as treasurer. Rutherford was said to have held a majority interest. He brought in his brother-in-law, George Drake, to assist with repairs to the mill and announced that the mill would be substantially rebuilt and enlarged, including a factory to produce boxes for canned salmon.

New machinery in the Juneau mill included an Allis Chalmers carriage, a Trout setworks, a larger motor and mechanical spotter for the edger, a fast-feed Stetson-Ross planer, and a Sumner log loader, increasing production to 60,000 feet in a 10-hour day.

It is uncertain which Southeastern Alaska sawmill first began producing the precisely cut boards, known as box shooks, needed to make salmon cases, but in 1919 the Wilson & Sylvester mill at Wrangell was the only one producing them in quantity. A standard salmon case held 48 one-pound tall cans (50 were sometimes fitted in when the packing crew had time to fool around) and the cases were nailed together at the cannery. The Southeastern Alaska canned salmon pack in 1919 exceeded three million cases. The Wrangell mill usually produced the shooks for about a million cases; the remainder were shipped in from Puget Sound. The Ketchikan Spruce Mills was preparing to install a box factory and it is understandable that Rutherford contemplated doing the same. It was not until 1925, however, that the necessary equipment was added to the Juneau Lumber Mills plant. The reason for the delay probably had to do with the potential market. Following the end of World War I the government had flooded the market with surplus canned salmon and this caused many canneries to close. In 1921 the Southeastern pack barely topped 800,000 cases.

In the meanwhile, however, a major market for Alaska lumber was developing in Australia, and Manager Rutherford went after that.