AHS Blog
Tenakee’s Superior Packing Company
By: Vicki Wisenbaugh
Bob Pegues
Note: Tenakee Historical Collection received a grant from the Alaska Historical Society’s Alaska Historic Canneries Initiative to catalog a collection of materials from Tenakee Springs’ Superior Packing Co. All of the photos in this post come from Tenakee Historical Collection.
Bob Pegues was a pillar of the Chichagof Island community of Tenakee Springs for over 40 years. He was part owner and year round caretaker of the ruins of the Superior Packing Company cannery property. In his retirement years, Bob undertook research for a book about the cannery, its history and the complex financial dealings of the owners. Bob’s efforts were cut short by cancer and his files were bequeathed in a scrambled heap to the Tenakee Historical Collection.
Cannery employees at work.
Thanks to a grant from the Alaska Historical Society, the Tenakee Historical Collection was able to sort out that pile of paper, photos and publications to make the information more accessible for future research.
Sorting and filing Bob’s research offered tantalizing glimpses of the past century, when fish traps and rapacious plunder of salmon streams were the norm, and the territorial authorities were occupied with violations of the Alaska Bone Dry Act and acts of “unlawful co-habitation” as well as assault and suspected murder. Bob’s collection of original documents, photos, articles, letters and interview transcripts are now safely stored in the archives of the Tenakee Historical Collection museum, and ready for further exploration by anyone with a keen interest in the cannery era.
Superior Packing ca 1918.
Superior Packing, ca 1921-1928.
The cannery had segregated housing, like most canneries of the era.
The children of the cannery’s owner, John Tenneson, were the models for the company’s labels.
The Whitney-Fidalgo Cannery on Ship Creek, Anchorage
By: Mark LaRiviere
Note: The following was written in the Fall of 1976. No salmon canneries remain on Ship Creek today.
Below the hustle-bustle of downtown Anchorage, at the mouth of Ship Creek, is the only remaining salmon cannery in upper Cook Inlet. At one time there were two canneries in Anchorage and three in the upper Inlet area, but the days of small, owner operated canneries in Alaska are over and only the Whitney-Fidalgo Seafoods, Inc. Anchorage cannery remains in upper Cook Inlet.
This cannery is a direct link to a large part of Alaska’s past – the salmon canning days. Starting in Southeast Alaska in 1878 and growing to a peak in 1936 with a pack of 8.4 million cases, the salmon canning industry has had a powerful impact on the economic and sociological development of Alaska as a territory and as a state. Today the industry still plays an important role in the Alaskan economy, providing summertime employment for people from remote area and market for fisherman to earn the money they need to sustain them throughout the remainder of the year. Many of these peoples live in the bush year-round or are Natives in remote villages and settlements who fish for subsistence.
It was a mix of people such as these that I met and worked with during three summers of employment at the Anchorage cannery; 1974, 1975, and 1976. Mostly set-net fisherman, they fished the upper Cook Inlet shorelines, intertidal areas and Susitna River delta. Fishing in 25 to 30 foot tidal fluctuations and murky brown water they tended their nets with outboard powered skiffs, delivering their catch to the cannery or to the shallow draft scows and tenders that operate in the inshore areas of upper Cook Inlet.
The catch from these fisherman is canned at the Anchorage cannery. First built in 1931, and operated by H.J. Emard as Emard Packing Company, Inc., it survived a period of which I know little of its history. Johnny Bumanglag, the fish house foreman, and Joe, the present-day retort operator, are still working from the 1930’s when Emard first starting canning salmon there. In those days the F/V Henry J. served as a tender to upper Cook Inlet fishermen, taking out the scows in the spring, picking up in the summer and returning them to the cannery in the fall.
Ship Creek, the waterfrontage of the cannery, is not too aptly named since few ships (or boats) can operate in a channel that fluctuates from 1 to 31 feet in 12 hours or less. Only flat bottom vessels or vessels with hulls strong enough to withstand several beachings during the course of a visit can “tie up” to the cannery dock. Large flat-bottomed vessels are often brought into the mouth of the creek and unloaded next to a concrete ship that is permanently dug into the Terminal Yards fill at the mouth of Ship Creek.
Processing herring at the Ship Creek facility in 1972. Photo courtesy Dexter Lorance.
Fish arrives via rail to the Whitney-Fidalgo cannery in Anchorage in 1972. Photo courtesy Dexter Lorance.
The cannery is a collection of rather jostled and dilapidated old buildings and trailers that show their age and the fact they suffered through the Alaska earthquake of 1964. Inside the canning line warehouse, the can shop normally on the second floor of canneries, rests at the same level as the canning line, a result of the floor collapsing beneath it during the earthquake and cannery economics dictating it to be left there as long as it worked. No wonder one can walk along a wall in the warehouse and come upon a window in the wall whose top edge is below the waistline.
A small group of people live on the premises, similar to remote area canneries that are complete settlements in themselves, but the majority of workers commute from within the city. The machinist crew, Filipinos and office workers are brought in from the lower 48, and rest of the crew is hired from the local work force. Some of them have been working canneries for many years, such as Minnie who lives in Wasilla and commutes to work, often staying and sleeping in her car when working into the wee hours of the night.
Squeezed between Elmendorf AFB, Terminal Yards and downtown Anchorage you can almost hear the cannery breathe a sigh of relief to be connected on a waterway to the open ocean waters. The city is moving in all around. Much of the property the cannery is located upon is on old fill from early day excavation projects in surrounding areas. Jutting into this fill and coming right up to the cannery road, is little estuarine bay of vital importance to the cannery. Along the edges of this small embayment are skids upon which the fish scows are placed in the wintertime to protect them from the freeze up of upper Cook Inlet waters. The scows are placed out in the spring at strategic locations on the east side of Cook Inlet from Boulder Point to Fire Island and on the west side from Tyrone to West Foreland. The fisherman, notified of openings by radio and written notice, net and recover the salmon and deliver their catch to the scows. There they are covered with wetted burlap to keep them cool and protected from the wind, sun and seagulls. The fisherman return to their camps and a tender from the Anchorage cannery comes on a regular schedule to pick up the fish. All five species of Pacific salmon ae caught in upper Cook Inlet with reds and pinks making up the majority of the catch.
Counts are kept of the number of each species from each bin and a fish ticket is written up for the fisherman registered to that bin. Back in the cannery office the fisherman will be credited with an amount equal to the number of each species landed, times the average weight of that species that week as determined by a negotiating board or an Alaska Department of Fish and Game sampling crew.
The scows are the only logical low cost way to service the fish camps along each side of upper Cook Inlet. Requiring little maintenance, each scow can accommodate the fish from several individual fish camps along that stretch of the shoreline and minimize the time the tender needs to pick up the fish. These fisherman have banded together into the Upper Cook Inlet Fisherman’s Association and it is this group that Whitney-Fidalgo officials must bargain with each year for the prices and contracts to fish. Other processors compete for the fish in the area, with Kenai being the most popular alternative landing site.
During the peak of the run it is not uncommon for the F/V Totem (the modern day replacement of the Henry J) to return to the cannery loaded to the brim with pink, red and silver salmon. Often times having 20,000 or more fish in its holds, the Totem will bring in two such loads a week. This is when the people in the canneries earn their salt. With no holding facilities for this mass of fresh product, except for a few chilled seawater bins that act as temporary storage silos, these fish must be canned.
The machinery has got to operate correctly and the people must work until the job is done. If the cannery superintendent could find robots to man the machines at time like these he would be satisfied. Instead they often bend to the fact that real human people work at the cannery and they often knock off work just after midnight to allow the cannery crew some sleep (often averaging less than 6 hours) before starting up the cannery again the next morning to can more fish. The times of working past midnight do not usually last more than 8-10 days at a stretch and thank heaven! You can only like salmon, working and making money just so much. Then there is your body to consider.
The cannery becomes a world unto itself. Those of us that lived there would seldom wander even up into downtown Anchorage – less than one mile away. The entire plant and its operations became dependent upon the outside connection of the ALASKA railroad, delivering the tin ends and can bodies and taking away the still cooking pallets of canned salmon. The warehouse of the cannery is so small and lacking in floor space that if the pack was not removed daily by rail cars and new ones spotted at the doors, the pallets would be stacked on the floor and this accumulation could shut down the cannery operations within 24 hours.
The effluent from the cannery operations is discharged into Ship Creek. Thousands of pounds of offal – everything on the fish that is not canned or salted – is ground up and mixed with water to form a slurry. This slurry is piped to below the mean low water mark on Ship Creek to meet the Environmental Protection Agency’s effluent permit and released. There the ever-hungry, opportunistic seagulls find it.
In the summer, on low tides one can always tell at a glance whether or not the cannery is operating by the presence or absence of large numbers of seagulls alighting on Ship Creek just below the cannery, floating downstream bobbing and ducking for the salmon offal and screaming, screeching and fighting amongst themselves. The gulls, mostly California gulls, roost upon the mud flats below downtown Anchorage and feed upon the cannery effluent. Streams of gulls capitalize upon this food, forming a steady circle from the mouth of the creek up to the discharge pipe.
It is quite a spectacular sight – I have seen feeding congregations of 5,000 or more seagulls below the cannery. Some of the gulls are huge and will attack unsuspecting humans! I have two documented cases of seagulls attacking people in the Terminal Yards area. My guess is more people have had the experience, but are afraid to reveal it for the sake of ridicule. Who has ever heard of such a thing – dive bombing seagulls, noiselessly heading for your head? Often times they drop a little package as you dissuade them to leave. Alaska is full of animals that will attack, but seagulls – without provocation?
As sudden as they start, the salmon runs in upper Cook Inlet start to diminish. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game begins to limit fishing time, catch per unit of effort decreases and the fisherman cease fishing. It is more profitable, or less expensive for them to resume other activities. They close up the fish camp, move back to the city or the bush and wait until next season. Life at the cannery continues with the necessary clean up, machinery maintenance, final shipments of canned salmon and recovery and storage of the scows for the winter.
The last week of August is traditionally the time when the scows are towed back to the cannery dock by the tender, moved at high tide by the beach gang in a small runabout to the foot of the skids, and winched up by the old authentic looking steam engine. There they are secured and left for the winter. The tender leaves and goes south for the winter before the freeze up as does the cannery crew. The buildings are boarded up to await the next spring and beginning of another salmon canning season.
Elemental and True: Glacier Bay Seafoods, 1972-1974
Glacier Bay Seafoods in Ouzinkie, Alaska, in the early 1970s, with a Kodiak Air Grumman Goose mail plane heading to the village beach. Photo by Tim Smith.
By: Susan Morgan
We were never supposed to live in Ouzinkie.
That revelation from my mom blew my mind. We had never been one of those families that had meetings to discuss things, but I always assumed at least my mom knew what was happening. As it turns out, not so much.
I’d wondered why we left our two wonderful dogs, Missy and Gazebo, at our home in Anchorage under the care of neighbors when we moved to Ouzinkie in 1972. Turns out, Mom thought we were just going for a visit, maybe a few weeks, maybe a month. Just to see my dad, who was over there — wherever “there” was — getting a shrimp processing plant running.
Susan Morgan in the cannery office, 1973.
It took me 40-some years to learn that the same things that surprised me about Ouzinkie also surprised her.
For example, like me, Mom wasn’t thrilled that my brother and I had to sleep in the cannery’s brightly lit office at the far end of the dock over the water that first summer. There simply was nowhere else. And she definitely wasn’t happy to learn that the tiny pink trailer at the other end of the dock where she was supposed to stay with my dad was also occupied by the cannery’s then-foreman.
But probably the biggest shock for Mom was that once we were there for our “visit,” my dad gave no indication he wanted us to go home to Anchorage. Unbeknownst to her, at least at first, “home” was now here, where my dad was, in this village of fewer than 200 people. When Mom finally figured that out, she made a fast trip to Anchorage to gather more clothes and give away our long-suffering dogs.
Over time, those three years in Ouzinkie proved to be life-changing for every one of us.
My mom and dad built a business that, for a while at least, thrived beyond anything they’d imagined. Mom says a “ton of money” went through that plant, as endless boatloads of raw shrimp were caught, processed and sold to our eager market in Great Britain.
My mom and stepdad, Donna and George Grant, pre-cannery.
Unlike their prior seafood ventures, my parents even walked away with a small profit at the end. When their partner bought out their share after they were too exhausted to keep the plant open any longer, they enjoyed a rare taste of financial comfort. Daddy told Mom to design her dream kitchen and they’d build it. She still loves those walnut cabinets.
Those years influenced my younger brother, too, now a renowned professor and scientist who specializes in water quality. He credits time spent in the tidepools and beaches of Ouzinkie, where everything including our cannery waste was dumped in the ocean, for sparking that interest.
And I’ve always referred back to that time for pretty much everything that makes me who I am. I’d grown up a quiet, middle child, and to be plunked into the middle of the wild and crazy world that was Kodiak and environs in the 1970s… well, it was a revelation.
My new friends in the cannery taught me about Kerouac, the joys of communal living, pot, hitchhiking and freedom. I fell in love for the first time and experienced the deaths of people I cared about for the first time. I saw people who watched out for others in ways that went far beyond words. If someone was missing in a storm, they went — without hesitation — into the storm themselves to rescue them.
Nothing was trite here, it seemed to me. Nothing was unimportant.
I loved that. It felt like all the artifice of the world had been stripped away. This was how life was meant to be, I thought: elemental and true. With a hell of a lot of fun thrown in.
My plan for exploring these few years when my family’s cannery operated in Ouzinkie was to discover why I loved it so much, why I remembered it so fondly 40-plus years later. I wanted to find my old friends and coworkers and learn if that place, that time, affected them as much as it did me.
I did, and it did.
But the biggest surprise for me in this whole enterprise was how much I learned and realized about my parents.
I was a teenager when we lived in Ouzinkie, and like most teenagers, I found my parents occasionally embarrassing. I especially hated it when they’d sometimes stroll through the processing plant, arm in arm, while my friends and I worked on the fish pick line. It seemed so … parental!
But in looking back, I can see now how those strolls must have felt to them.
This building where dozens of us worked, sometimes in shifts around the clock, had been empty when they bought it. They had taken nothing, a cavernous structure, and by their wits and creativity and with very little financial backing, had created this bustling plant. Villagers, college students, boat crews and more made a good living because of my parents’ creation.
The fish pick line, Glacier Bay Seafoods, 1972.
And the shrimp was fantastic. I don’t eat it anymore — being drenched in the stuff for three years will do that to a person — but even I know it was extraordinary. Forty years later, people I talked to remembered how great it tasted, cooked just right in pristine sea water, peeled perfectly by intricate adjustments to the giant array of peelers, and how it was then cunningly frozen in mid-air so every shrimp stayed fresh and separate.
It was a thing of which they were rightly proud. I wish I’d realized that at the time.
***
My mom believed things were coming to a crisis point for us when we left Ouzinkie.
While most people there had been wonderful and welcoming when we arrived, one or two had been actively hostile. Mom suspects it was because the cannery building had previously been owned by the village, but had, we were told, been lost to bankruptcy.
She and my dad, possibly seen as interlopers by some, had even been personally threatened; someone would get drunk, wave a weapon around, and vow to come down to the dock and “wipe them” — us — out.
Plus, getting anywhere off the island involved flying in often iffy weather, and never mind the hazards faced daily by our boats, navigating the most treacherous waters in the world to feed our insatiable need for more shrimp. Living with worries like that can take a toll. It did on my folks.
Mom’s fears seemed borne out when Dan Abell, my dad’s right-hand man at the cannery and our longtime friend, was shot and killed in his bed a few months after we left the village. And a few months after that, the cannery itself burned, destroying the place we’d lived for three years.
I’ve never been able to go back to Ouzinkie since then. Even photos of the charred remnants of the dock right after the fire – looking for all the world like the skeleton of a giant whale – breaks my heart.
Glacier Bay Seafoods dock in Ouzinkie after the fire that destroyed it, 1975. Photo by Warren Good
But in a way, that violent and final ending to our cannery is in keeping with the lessons I learned there.
We had no buffers in Ouzinkie. We and everyone else lived and died, truly, with nature.
When I interviewed Tim Southworth for this project, he said his time working in Ouzinkie taught him where “the edge” was. While he learned he wasn’t constitutionally equipped to live on the edge forever, he said it informed his life to know where it was.
I think that’s been true for all of us.
Like many others in Ouzinkie at that time, I was fortunate to live — and survive — a few years very close to the edge. It was heady, exhilarating, terrifying and unforgettable.
At 22, I made a conscious, deliberate choice to step back from that edge. It was the right decision and I don’t regret it. But part of me still longs for the way I felt there, the others I knew there. And to be honest, part of me still misses the view.
Canned: The NN Cannery Project
By: Katie Ringsmuth, PhD
One of the most important 20th century industries on the West Coast was the canning of Pacific salmon. In its heyday the industry caught and canned enough salmon to feed four pounds of salmon a year to every man woman and child in America. Lined up end to end, these one pound tins could have circled the globe. As anthropologist Alan Boraas notes, “Canneries transformed this entire area and represent the industrial revolution of the North.”
Diamond NN cannery at South Naknek, Bristol Bay.
Canneries were (and still are) cultural hubs that reflect and, in part, spawned Alaska’s diverse population. The Alaska Packers Association (APA) employed mostly immigrants from Europe to catch salmon. Skilled immigrants also built both the canneries and the boats. To process the salmon, canneries hired Asian crews that linked Alaska to the broader Pacific World.
Many Alaska Natives who worked at the cannery were descendants of Katmai. Many migrated downriver to South Naknek after the Novarupta volcano destroyed their Savonoski village in 1912 and the Spanish Flu pandemic devastated inhabitants in 1919. APA’s <NN> Cannery in South Naknek is historically significant because the structures, objects and the industrial landscape collectively tell the story of these varied, yet forgotten people.
Rusted corrugated tin, discarded machines parts, broken boardwalks, and skeletal remains of bunkhouses are the enduring reminders of the past that gives voice to the cannery workers people who are practically invisible to the historical record. These were diverse people from different places who found dignity through their laborious interactions and forged a deep connection to the surrounding environment. Their work mattered.
Jeanie Steward and Katie Ringsmuth in South Naknek’s mess hall.
According to environmental historian Richard White, “We have obscured and are only slowly recovering [the historical framework] that labor … involves human beings with the world so thoroughly that they can never be disentangled.” Therefore, instead of controlling or conquering South Naknek’s natural landscape, these workers were utterly immersed within it.
With the exception of two years during WWII, the South Naknek <NN> Cannery has operated for over 100 years. The cannery’s presence on the Naknek River spans a history from the days of salteries to sail boats, tall ships to aviation, steam power to globalization. Collectively, the cannery buildings, boardwalks, machines, and other contributing properties convey a broad range of historical contexts: corporate, technological, cultural, economic, and environmental.
Of all the canneries built in Alaska, very few currently left standing possess the <NN> cannery’s integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling and association, and meet all the criteria for historic evaluation.
July Fieldwork
Bob King presents at Naknek during Fishtival.
This summer, historians Katie Ringsmuth and Bob King received a grant from the Alaska Historic Canneries Initiative to conduct an initial preservation assessment of the Diamond NN cannery in Bristol Bay. With grant funds, they traveled to South Naknek with John Wachtel, Historical Architect with the National Park Service, built a base of support on both sides of the Naknek River, and created materials to promote the next phase of the project called Canned.
Canned is a participatory history project that aims to document, preserve, and interpret the historical and architectural significance of an Alaskan salmon cannery and, perhaps most importantly, to convey to the public the unknown stories of the multitudes of people who canned salmon and created an ethnically diverse, economically vital, cannery culture.
In addition to the building assessment, local filmmakers and project collaborators, LaRece Egli and Sharon Thompson produced was a 7 minute film, documenting the historical work.
Using a 1968 cannery plat and building inventory, the aim of the survey was to determine:
- The general condition of the buildings
1968 cannery plat used for the survey.
- The buildings’ historical/cultural/social associations
- The buildings’ historic and current function
- If a building had moved or was modified from its historic use
- The meaning or reasons behind change
- How the interconnected parts worked to create a unified system.
Although the project remains a work in progress, the color coded chart produced by the National Park Service shows the structures and their corresponding Architectural and Historic Value, as well as the combined “Overall Value”. The results allow the data to be visualized on a map and, perhaps more importantly, the map gives us a framework from which to start the evaluation process.
Collaboration with Trident Seafoods
On November 19, 2016, Bob King, Katie Ringsmuth, Sharon Thompson and Anjuli Grantham, met with executives at Trident Seafoods to discuss the future of the NN Cannery at South Naknek. After a positive meeting, we received the green light to move forward on the NN cannery history project that will take our effort into 2017, and beyond. Trident assured us that they will follow-up with official permission by mid-January.
Canned will be a multi-project program that, if fully-funded and supported, will result in the following:
- Listing of the South Naknek Diamond NN cannery on the National Register of Historic Places.
- An illustrative publication about the history of the cannery.
- A traveling exhibition or series of exhibits that interpret cannery history through the lens of global connections.
Stay tuned as the NN Cannery project progresses.
Aerial view of Diamond NN in South Naknek.
One Alaskero in the Smiley Cannery Gang
Ketchikan’s Pacific American Fisheries crew in 1929. Photo courtesy Melissa Stouffer.
By: Anjuli Grantham
Melissa Stouffer recently shared two photographs with the Alaska Historical Society, depicting her grandfather’s time in Alaska. Roman Andres was born in Abulug, Cagayan, Philippines ca 1908. He traveled around the Pacific for several years, likely working as a migrant laborer. During this time, he joined thousands of other Filipino manongs in Alaska. Manong, or uncle, is the term that describes this early generation of Filipino-American immigrants.
Melissa knows little about her grandfather’s time in Alaska. From the photograph labeled “Smiley Cannery Gang,” we see that in 1929, Roman Andres worked at the Pacific American Fisheries cannery in Ketchikan. “Smiley” is not referring to the happy faces of those photographed, but rather the previous name of the cannery. In 1916, J.L. Smiley built the cannery in Ketchikan. Smiley previously owned and operated a cannery in Blaine, Washington. In 1918, J.L. Smiley & Co. merged with other enterprises to become Wilson Fisheries Co. In 1928, the seafood behemoth Pacific American Fisheries purchased the facility in Ketchikan. Although the cannery was not officially named after Smiley for nearly twenty years when Roman Andres worked there, from the photograph we can see that the name persisted.
Roman Andres. Photo courtesy Melissa Stouffer.
It seems that Andres was a pensionado, or a Filipino student who was able to come to the United States to attend school. He graduated from high school in New York. Later, he served in a Filipino regiment during WWII and returned to the US with a wife. Like many other Filipino-Americans of this generation, Andres worked in the food service industry. He settled in Mt. Clemens, Michigan and worked as the head chef at the Colonial Hotel. He died in 1972.
Thanks to Melissa for sharing these photos that help to articulate the deep and longstanding connection that Alaska shares with the Philippines.
