The Cannery at Labouchere Bay
When I produced Rise & Fall of the Star of Bengal, I could never find a map of the Alaska Packers Association cannery in Wrangell… until now! I’ve restored and colorized the map.
What’s most interesting to me about this map is that it shows something you can’t see in Wrangell anymore: Labouchere Bay.
The original version of this map came from the Alaska Packers Association Records, Series III: Property, Sub-Series 6: Survey Maps, Microfiche 448, Western Libraries, Western Washington University. I had to approximate the locations of some of the buildings, the airport runway, and Deadman’s Island.
Labouchere Bay
Labouchere Bay is named for the Hudson Bay Company steamship, Labouchere. Around the middle of the 1800s, the company tried out a new strategy. Instead of occupying Fort Stikine inside Etolin Harbor—which was costly and led to conflict—they would send regular steamships to Alaska to trade with locals for fur. Writing in Demystifying the Opposition, Dr. Laura Klein says:
“Fort Stikine was abandoned in 1848. With this, the era of the company’s ships, traders, and especially the steamers (most notably the Beaver and the Labouchere) took over in Alaska.”
While Etolin Harbor was the bustling home of the Tlingit village of Ḵaachx̱ana.áakʼw, Labouchere Bay was semi-isolated and near the mouth of the Stikine River.
Labouchere Bay went by a few names. It sat a short distance from the northern tip of Wrangell Island called Point Highfield, so some maps identified it as Highfield Anchorage. In 1869, R.W. Meade of the U.S. Navy called it Point Highfield Harbor. The first name for the bay was most likely in Tlingit, but I failed to find it in the record.
Fort Wrangel Cannery
Wrangell’s Alaska Packers Association cannery, 1914.
Almost half a century after the Hudson Bay Company used Labouchere Bay for the fur trade, the Alaska Packers Association used it for the cannery business. The General Superintendent of the APA, J.F. Moser, wrote a brief history of Wrangell’s cannery:
“In 1887 the Aberdeen Packing Company, of Astoria, Oregon, built a cannery on the Stikine River, about 8 miles above the mouth, with the intention of making the entire pack from the catch of this river. After packing two seasons, in the fall of 1888 and spring of 1889, the cannery was moved to Point Highfield, on the northern end of Wrangell Island, and operations commenced under the name of the Glacier Packing Company. In 1892 it entered the Alaska Packing Association and was closed, and in 1893 it joined the Alaska Packer’s Association.”
In its records, the APA referred to cannery as Fort Wrangel, or <FW>, long after the town dropped “Fort” from its name. Each summer, the APA sent a sailing ship laden with workers and supplies for the long summer season. It was the 1908 season where the Star of Bengal wrecked on its return voyage south. In 1927, the APA ended operations in the cannery for good.
An Airport for Wrangell
Quoting From Wikipedia: “From left: Hunt Gruening (Alaska Airlines VP, who came on board from their acquisition of Alaska Coastal Airlines that year), Harold Strandberg (Commissioner of Public Works and onetime president of one of Alaska's predecessor airlines), Ernie Haugen (state representative for Wrangell) and Frank Murkowski (Commissioner of Economic Development and recent Wrangell resident).”
It was Alaska Day 1968, the 101st anniversary of the sale of Russia’s interests in Alaska to the United States. People gathered for a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the former site of Labouchere Bay and the new site of the Wrangell Airport. This was the latest achievement in the state’s “Get Aviation on Wheels” program to get airports for Alaska’s rural communities.
Finding accessible, level ground for an airfield on Wrangell Island was difficult. To solve this problem, Wrangell’s airport planners turned to Labouchere Bay. The bay was filled with rock and covered with concrete in order to create the parking lot, terminal, and runway. But the cannery isn’t complete gone. According to a 2015 map from NOAA, there are still pilings in the water just off the runway.
While Labouchere Bay is no more, it continues to play an important role for navigators and visitors to Wrangell Island as an airport.