Digital Bob Archive

Franklin Street in downtown Juneau was named for Howard Franklin who was an early but not a longtime resident of Juneau. Not a whole lot is known about him. He first appears in the Juneau records on February 24, 1881, when with five other men he staked a group of placer claims on Specimen Gulch in the Gold Creek Valley.

At that time Franklin was past 40 and he was said to have been a native of New York State. In all probability he was one of the many early Juneau residents who came here after mining for several years in the Cassiar District of British Columbia.

At a miners' meeting in Juneau on March 21, 1881, Franklin, J.M. Cooper and Frank McMahon were named a committee to \"recommend a waterfront line, the proper streets, the size of lots, and so forth.\" It was this committee that laid out Main, Seward and Franklin Streets and the cross streets, with blocks 200 feet square. The reason Franklin's name, alone of all the miners, was chosen at that time for one of the streets is not disclosed by any available Juneau records.

Franklin was fairly active in acquiring both mining and town property. He claimed one lot where the Baranof Hotel is today, and another on the waterfront between Seward and Main Streets. The Franklin Hotel, Juneau's first, was built on the latter lot which is today used for parking next to the IBEW Building. Franklin mined on Gold Creek in 1881 and 1882. Frank McMahon was his partner in several placer claims, and James \"Slim Jim\" Winn in another one. He staked one lode claim, the Savage, and bought an arastra to test its ores. In 1882 he sold most of his property and although he was reported mining on Gold Creek in the summer of 1883, that fall or the following winter he went north over the Chilkoot Pass. In the summer of 1885 Franklin and a partner, Henry Matson, reportedly recovered about $500 worth of gold apiece in the White River area. And the following summer Franklin discovered what the miners called \"coarse gold\" - that is, nuggets rather than dust - on the Fortymile River where Franklin Gulch was named for him. It was the first such discovery in the Interior.

In the absence of information to the contrary, it is assumed that Franklin continued to prospect and mine in the Fortymile District and later in the Klondike, but he wasn't a man about whom many news stories were written. Then in 1904 the Dawson Daily News reported that he had died at the age of 65 of heart failure that resulted from falling into Bonanza Creek. According to the story, he was at work on 56 Below, Bonanza, on Friday, May 27. The stream was very high and swift with the spring run-off, and Franklin somehow fell into it. He was carried a hundred yards downstream and was badly battered before he escaped. He spent a couple of days in bed, but on May 30 was up and was splitting wood when his partner left him at their cabin. When the partner returned some hours later, Franklin was dead. He was buried in Dawson.

Franklin Street in Juneau and Franklin Gulch in the Yukon drainage remain as monuments to a pioneer miner.