SITKA Administrative History

Chapter 4:
SITKA NATIONAL MONUMENT, MIDDLE YEARS (continued)

The Context Changes

The Sitka that the National Park Service's first full-time custodian for Sitka National Monument came to in 1940 was changing rapidly. Army and navy personnel were returning to Sitka in numbers after an absence of decades. Their presence and purpose affected Sitka, the custodian's role in the town, and operations of Sitka National Monument.

Sitka had been the scene of an army garrison from 1867 to 1877. After the army pulled out, a series of naval installations were located in Sitka. Most of them were located on nearby Japonski Island, which had been established as a naval reservation by the 1890 presidential proclamation that had also reserved the public park on Indian River.

Sitka was an anchorage for a navy ship from 1879 to 1897, host to a Marine Barracks from 1884 to 1912, locus for a naval hospital from 1904 to 1912, and home community to a naval radio station from 1907 to the early 1930s. For most of these years there was a navy coal pile located on Japonski Island. In 1931, the radio station was decommissioned and its buildings and those of the coal pile were put in the custody of the commandant of the Puget Sound Navy Yard.

Eiler Hansen, who had earlier corresponded with the National Park Service about erecting the Merrill plaque, wrote a 1940 article in which he observed that "...the navy finally discovered that it had a coal shed which had never housed any coal, a wharf at which no ships ever docked, a radio station where no messages were sent or received and a complement of men who were being paid for raising gold fish and coots." Sitkans' efforts to re establish the navy at Sitka were, according to Hansen, to no avail. But in 1935, in his words, "the Navy Board of Strategy . . . turned its myopic eye on Alaska." Adm. Ernest J. King came to investigate and visited Sitka. The result of the visit was, again according to Hansen, that the navy gouged out a hole for an airplane ramp on Japonski Island, converted the old coal shed there to a barracks, tied up converted destroyers at the dock on the island, and transformed a house into a bachelor officers' quarters. Although Hansen attributed the navy's renewed attention to "some dark and devious process unknown to the mind of ordinary man," the decision to build at Sitka evolved from a rational process. [193]

The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 had prohibited the navy from building bases in Alaskan waters, but the navy conducted many aerial and ship surveys in those waters during the 1920s and 1930s. When Japan allowed the treaty to expire without renewal in 1936, the navy commissioned Rear Adm. Arthur J. Hepburn, a former Director of Naval Intelligence, to head a board which would study and report on its strategic needs. While the matter was under study, the navy designated its old reservation on Japonski Island as the Naval Seaplane Base, Sitka, in 1937, and the Fleet Air Base, Sitka, in February 1938. These early activities resulted in only a few navy personnel being relocated to Sitka, while half squadrons (six plane detachments) of patrol seaplanes rotated through Sitka every six months.

The Hepburn Board submitted its report in December 1938. Naval air, destroyer, and submarine bases were recommended for Sitka and also for Kodiak and Dutch Harbor. Congress appropriated some of the necessary money, contracts were let to Siems Drake Puget Sound, a joint venture construction company, and the first workers arrived in the fall of 1939 to begin building the new naval facilities.

In September of 1939, although only a few contractors' buildings were in place on Japonski Island, the navy designated its Sitka facility as a Naval Air Station. Ultimately 65 percent of 155 separate projects at a total cost of 25 million dollars would be completed in and around Sitka. The contractors brought in nearly 1,700 workers (more than the total of Sitka's estimated 1939 population), navy personnel arrived to staff the facility, and army troops assembled to guard the navy facilities. Scores of buildings were erected and more than 13 miles of road were laid out on Japonski Island and the smaller islets in Sitka Bay that the contractors connected by causeways.

Sitka's population exploded, its resources such as Indian River were tapped to provide fresh water for the new residents of Japonski Island, prices for food and housing rose, and construction needs triggered a search for gravel sources. [194]