Category: Alaska’s Historic Canneries

Sat, June 04, 2016

Fire at Park’s Cannery Reminder of Vulnerable History

[caption id="attachment_4480" align="alignright" width="890"] Parks Cannery, now the Spirit of Alaska Wilderness Lodge, photographed in the summer of 2015 for the West Side Stories project. Photo by Breanna Peterson.[/caption] The important work of documenting cannery history became clearly- and tragically- evident last week when an early morning fire broke out at the Parks Cannery in Uyak Bay on the west side of Kodiak Island. One person was killed and three were injured in the fire, which appears to have not... (Read More)

Thu, May 05, 2016

Storage Wars, Everett, WA: What was a 1949 Non-Resident Alaska Fishing License?

By: Bob King, Juneau Inside an abandoned storage unit auctioned off in Everett, WA, last year, the successful bidder found, among other things, a folder that included some high school football programs dating back to the early 1950s and a small, 6 by 4 inch, yellow metal plate: a 1949 Alaska non-resident fisherman’s license. Not recognizing the item, he reached out to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. They didn’t recognize it either and turned to members of the... (Read More)

Wed, April 20, 2016

Crumbling Cannery

Rick Metzger shared this poem, which he found in the Pacific American Fisheries archive in Bellingham. There is no author attribution. (Note: In an email received on May 22, 2022 from Robert Magnus Thorstenson Jr. of Juneau, Alaska, he wrote that his father had a copy of this poem in his archives and had the author identified on it as the late Dennis Sperl from Petersburg.) Crumbling Cannery An old weathered cannery lay silent in death, No signs of... (Read More)

Sat, April 09, 2016

Scratching the Surface: One Can, from Cordova to North Carolina

Cannery work is often monotonous. Standing in one place for hours, repeating the same hand motions over and over, attempting to keep alert as the predictable hums and clangs lull the worker towards dozing. However, Alice Ryser enjoyed her time at the New England Fishing Company's Orca plant outside of Cordova. Remembering mug-up and her fellow NEFCO cannery workers brings a smile to her face, fifty years after she left the cannery. But one incident in particular sticks out in... (Read More)

Thu, March 24, 2016

Canneries and Boatbuilding through the 1920s in Sitka, Alaska

by Rebecca Poulson From Russian American times to the present, boats have been built in Sitka because people needed them, and could not afford to buy them; it was not an industry producing boats for selling outside the immediate area. Another factor throughout the centuries, from canoes to aluminum skiffs, is the pure joy of building a boat, and the pride in creating a beautiful, quality vessel. Boat and shipbuilding in Sitka, and the builders and their backgrounds and... (Read More)