Alaska Packers' Rock

Quick Facts

Location:

Friday Harbor, WA

The Alaska Packers Association formed in 1891 as a salmon industry cartel, comprised of independent cannery owners who controlled the supply of salmon in order to control competition and prevent an oversupply of canned salmon from hurting prices for producers. It soon expanded and became a formal corporation with operations across Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. Though its operations were concentrated in Alaska, it also played a major role in San Juan Island, where numerous fishermen had fish traps near this spot.  

The Alaska Packers Association was not the only major company operating in these waters. As the industry expanded, “Big companies, especially Alaska Packers Association, and Pacific American Fisheries had monopolized the salmon fishing industry. The cost of the trap installation every year and the exclusive rights of canning the salmon dissuaded independents.” (Jacilee Wray, The Salmon Bank: An Ethnohistory, P.9) While corporations managed to monopolize the fish harvest, local entrepreneurs made good money supplying the fish camps. Former American Camp Sutler Edward Warbass and local homesteader Eliza Jakle made good money selling water to the corporate fish camps in 1901 and 1902, local women found work at the cookhouses, and farmers sold their produce to feed the fishery workers. 

This rock marks the spot where the Alaska Packers Association's fish trap was located. Bill Jakle who grew up near this spot explains that, "they had their trap right close here....probably fifty or sixty feet away from the rock where the pilings started." Fisherman Bill Mason further explained the unique nature of the fish trap at this location: “Believe it or not you could walk on the beach and [The Alaska Packers Association] had piling about every fifteen feet. And they had a wire up about three and a half feet high that you could hold onto and then a log that was cabled onto the piling that was driven into the ground. You could walk clear to the trap and then walk out there and see the fish living in the trap.” 

Today, no infrastructure is visible from this once-bustling industrial location. To untrained eyes, it appears that it was always a natural, marine environment, no different than any other pristine location in the San Juan Islands. This history reminds us of the  the possibility of rehabilitating and transforming industrial spaces through careful land management.