Digital Bob Archive

APRIL 2, 1885-Every trip of the mail steamer from Portland brings immense iron castings and other machinery parts for the gigantic stamp mill being put up by the Alaska Mill & Mining Company on Douglas Island to reduce ore from the Paris lode and other lode claims owned by the company. When completed, sometime during the coming summer, it will consist of 24 batteries of five stamps each, or 120 stamps in all, and it is said that this will make it the largest stamp mill in the world under one roof. It will be capable of crushing 300 tons of ore each 24 hours. John Treadwell, general superintendent of the company, is supervising the work of a number of millwrights who have come up from California for the job. A gang of carpenters is putting the heavy timbers in place to support the machinery and erecting the mill building. Treadwell has been hiring any man who wishes to work, including miners from the Basin, Indian laborers and a number of Chinese who lately arrived from Wrangell after having come out of the Cassiar where placer claims no longer pay, even for the Chinamen.

In addition to the mill, other facilities at the mine are being built or enlarged, including a bigger bunkhouse and messhouse, an office building, a larger blacksmith shop and miscellaneous storehouses. Some cabins are going up on both sides of the Alaska Mill & Mining Company property, forming two small communities of miners and laborers in addition to those in the Treadwell camp. The first man to build a cabin to south was John Curry, followed by C. O. Brown, F. Miller, John Dix, Peter Callsen and Z. T. Wilcox have also claimed building lots south of the Treadwell mine but so far have only put up tents. All these men are engaged in placering on the surface of lode claims in the area.

Robert Michaelson built the first cabin north of the Treadwell mine, on the beach near the Bear?s Nest claim. That was in the summer of 1883. Walter Pierce staked a lot near Michaelson that same summer, and early in 1884. H. H. Edwards staked a lot about 150 feet northwest of the Alaska Mill & Mining Company sawmill and built on it. The place is sometimes called Edwardsville, but others refer to it simply as Douglas. No fewer than 18 others, many of the residents of Juneau townsite, have claimed lots there. There is a growing opinion that a town is bound to spring up near the Treadwell mine. Among those with lots there are Karl Koehler and E. J. James who run the Northwest Trading Company store in Juneau and who want a business location in the new town, as well as Morse and Coberg, the saloon owners.