Digital Bob Archive

APRIL 1918 - PART 5

Juneau was not a cannery town the way Ketchikan was, but Juneau was the trade center for a lot of canneries: Auk Bay, Tee Harbor, Taku Harbor, Funter Bay, Hawk Inlet, Tenakee Inlet, Sitkoh Bay, Excursion Inlet, Hoonah, Dundas Bay and Port Althorp were the ones closest to town, and four more were building, at Hood Bay, Gambier Bay, Pybus Bay and Pavlof Harbor.

The four canneries under construction called on the Worthen sawmill in Juneau for all the lumber it could produce. The mill began running seven days a week, and W.S. Worthen said he would put on two shifts if he could get the men. He was, however, up against the same problem as the Alaska Juneau mine which had had to curtail operations because so many men had either joined the military forces or had gone south to work at higher paying jobs in the shipyards.

In addition to construction materials, during the month of April cannery tenders were loading what the newspapers described as \"supplies\" nearly every day. No figures are available as to the volume of business Juneau hardware, grocery, drug and clothing stores did with the canneries, but all in all the fisheries may have contributed more to Juneau's economy in that war year than the mines did.

Not all cannery construction was at a distance, either, and Gastineau Channel got its first canning plants that spring. W.A. Estus and J.T. Hansen, who had a cannery at Bangor, Washington, bought a piece of ground on Willoughby Avenue, between the Femmer and Ritter dock and Cash Cole's barn, and began to drive a dock and put up a 24 by 100-foot building for a cannery. When it was finished they brought their machinery up from Washington. They called their operation the Northern Packing Company and the plant reportedly had a capacity of 25,000 cases of salmon in a season. The tenders Diana, Kitty W. and Noisy Bill were used to bring in the fish but perhaps were not very busy. The plant, at any rate, managed to put up only 5,000 cases.

The J.H. Long Packing Company, which put up a cannery south of town, on the road to Sheep Creek, that spring did a little better and made a pack of 11,474 cases before the season ended. And on the Douglas side of the channel, there was also a small canning operation. T.E.P. Keegan converted an old sawmill for the purpose and used the boiler to provide steam for his retort. He experimented with packing salmon in gallon cans for the institutional trade, but his degree of success is not a matter of record.

Out at Auk Bay (as it was then spelled) the Auk Bay Salmon Canning Company, owned and operated by the J.L. Carlson family of Juneau, enlarged its dock and increased its canning capacity in 1918. It didn't match, in size, most of the canneries of the area but it did put up 22,508 cases of salmon that year.