Digital Bob Archive

The Juneau Lumber Mills, Inc. further enlarged and improved its plant between the fall of 1924 and the spring of 1927. The first item in this program was a box factory to produce the cases to hold 48 No. 1 tall cans of salmon. The market for this item was established and growing and was being partly supplied by the sawmills at Wrangell and Ketchikan.

The Juneau box factory included two band-resaws, three cutoff saws, three planers, three dry kilns built of steel and tile, and a printing plant for imprinting the sides and ends of the boxes. Also added at that time was a steel and concrete refuse burner and a new warehouse. The box factory began operating in the spring of 1925 and that year produced the shooks for 450,000 salmon boxes.

About the time the box factory got into full production, Henry Shattuck, who had been one of the owners of the mill since 1911, died at Juneau. The logging firm of Sawyer, Reynolds & Co. acquired an interest in the Juneau Lumber Mills soon after that and perhaps bought the Shattuck interest.

To finance the expansion of its main plant, the Juneau Lumber Mills in the fall of 1926 offered to the public $75,000 worth of 8 percent bonds in denominations of $500 and $1000. These were secured by a mortgage on the mill property, valued by a Seattle appraisal firm at $311,000. A prospectus said the mill had 1200 feet of deep water frontage and a four and a half acre site. The company also owned two tug boats, used for towing logs to the mill from various logging camps, and a fair-sized motor vessel, the Virginia IV, used for delivering box shooks to canneries and lumber to mines and other users in northern Southeast Alaska.

Proposed improvements would include a new building of 35,000 square feet to house the sawmill, planing mill, box factory and dry kilns. The sawmill, it was pointed out to prospective bond buyers, was the second most important industry in the area, employing 90 men for eight months of the year, with a payroll of $12,500 a month. Most of the bonds appear to have been purchased by Juneau residents.

D.D. Wilder, who had built sawmills all the way from Washington State to Australia and South Africa, was brought in to take charge of remodeling the mill. New machinery was purchased to the tune of $100,000, most of it from the Sumner Iron Works of Sumner, Washington.

A nine-foot band saw replaced the old circular head saw; its blade, it was stated, was 54 feet in length and 15 inches wide, and it ran at a speed of 10,000 feet a minute. The resaw was a seven-foot band saw. By the end of March, 1927, the new machinery was all in place and being tested, and on April 8 the welcome sound of the mill's steam whistle echoed from the surrounding mountains, calling the mill crew to work. There were about 95 men on the payroll, including the tug crews, and two million board feet of logs in the booms. The mill that year cut 10,434,000 board feet of lumber, including shooks for 725,000 salmon boxes, 33,000 railroad ties for the Alaska Railroad, and 200,000 board feet of airplane spruce destined for England.