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HISTORY CHAPTER 3

The cannery era

abundance packed into tins

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Kayler-Dahl Cannery, 1939

Courtesy Clausen Museum

If the fishermen built Petersburg, the canneries built its economy. At their peak, the canneries of Petersburg and Southeast Alaska processed staggering quantities of salmon, halibut, crab, and shrimp — packing the abundance of these waters into tins that would travel to tables across America and around the world.

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P.C. & N.P Co. Cannery - Iron Chink at work

Courtesy Clausen Museum

The cannery workforce was a portrait of immigrant America — men and women arriving from China, Japan, the Philippines, Scandinavia, and beyond, drawn by seasonal work that was hard, cold, and relentless. The social fabric of the canneries was its own world: bunkhouses, mess halls, the rhythm of the season, the smell of the sea and the steam.

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Magda Lind, Gerald Lind's mother, canning salmon, ca. 1940s

Courtesy Clausen Museum

From fish camps to cold storage — the arc of that industry is one of the great untold stories of American food history. Petersburg lived it, packed it, and shipped it out. The Clausen Museum holds the records

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From Fish Camps to Cold Storages

From the first Indigenous fish camps to the cannery operations that packed Alaska salmon for the world — Pat Ellis traces Petersburg's fishing story from its earliest roots to 1927.

Cannery

TIN CAN COUNTRY

VINTAGE CAN SALMON LABELS

​Courtesy of Clausen Museum

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Southeast Alaska's Historic Salmon Canneries

The salmon can label collection, in book form. Historic cannery photographs, rare labels, custom maps, and the colorful stories of the people who built Southeast Alaska's salmon industry — published by the Clausen Memorial Museum.

Tin Can Country:

fisk
everything Petersburg was built on
Celebrating our diverse stories - past, present and Future
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