Snug Harbor Cannery

By Katherine Johnson Ringsmuth, Historian

Only eleven years after the United States purchased Alaska from Russia, the first two salmon canneries began operating in southeast Alaska. As the nation's interest moved away from the broken South, attention turned towards America's newest territorial acquisition. Amazing tales of "red gold" trickled from the north and suddenly the rush to establish other canneries began, and the era of commercial exploitation of the salmon resource in Alaska was on....