Digital Bob Archive

The salmon continued to run in the Taku River without regard to gold discoveries and stampedes, but it was not until 1900 that a cannery was built to take advantage of those runs. When the year 1900 opened, the closest canneries to Juneau were at Wrangell to the south and at Chilkat Inlet to the north, but that year two were built in the Juneau area. One was at Snettisham Inlet, the other at Sunny Cove, Taku Inlet. The latter was built by John L. Carlson, a man who would be associated with salmon canning in the area for the next 21 years.

Carlson was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in December, 1847, and came to the United States in 1874. He settled at Astoria, Oregon, where he worked as a fisherman and began to learn the then very new business of salmon canning. In 1888 a group of Astoria men sent Carlson to southeastern Alaska to pick a site for a cannery. He selected a place at Jamestown Bay, near Sitka, but nothing came of the venture and, so far as is known, he did not return north until 1900.

That year some of the stockholders of the Alaska Fishermen's Packing Company at Astoria organized the Taku Packing Company with John Carlson as its president. Construction of the cannery began in March and it was ready for operation in Mayas a hand pack outfit with a capacity of only 250 cases a day. Fish for the cannery were caught with gillnets and all varieties except pinks were canned. The pack that year was about 9000 cases.

In 1901 the Taku Packing Company became a part of the Pacific Packing & Navigation Company which had an authorized capitalization of $32 million and was said to have been formed in opposition to the Alaska Packers Association, then the largest salmon canner on the entire coast. PP&N bought 18 canneries in Alaska, scattered from Boca de Quadra to Bristol Bay, as well as five on Puget Sound.

Carlson was retained as superintendent of the Taku Inlet cannery and that year put up about 25,000 cases. The company had two fish traps, one at Point Hilda on Douglas Island, the other near the mouth of the Taku River, only a few miles from the cannery. It should have been a winner but wasn't because icebergs from the nearby glaciers kept tearing out the web and knocking down the pilings. Icebergs, in fact, sometimes almost entirely blocked the inlet and threatened the cannery Itself. A few years earlier Peter Th. Buschmann had contemplated building a cannery on the inlet but moved to Wrangell Narrows instead, reportedly because of the threat from large, moving chunks of ice.

The Taku Inlet cannery put up packs in 1902 and 1903 but in 1903 the company got into financial difficulties and the cannery was operated by a court-appointed receiver. It was not operated in 1904 and it, along with most of the company's other Alaska canneries, was purchased by the Northwestern Fisheries Company.
This was one of the branches of the Alaska Syndicate which was opening a copper mine at Kennicott. The machinery at Sunny Cove was removed and the site abandoned.

The Sunny Cove plant was the first and last salmon cannery to operate on Taku Inlet. Many salmon were caught there, but they were canned elsewhere.