Daily Sitka Sentinel

A LOOK BACK IN SITKA: They Built Their Own Boats

By Rebecca Poulson
    From the second decade of the 1900s through the 1940s at least eight shops in Sitka built boats at various times. All of the builders did other things as well, mainly fishing.
    Few vessels were recorded before 1915, but between 1915 and 1930, there were at least 43, with 20 of those documented between 1917 and 1919 – nearly all of them seiners.
    The early seine boats were large flat-bottomed row boats supplied by the canneries. Nets were pulled by hand.
    On Puget Sound, gas engines revolutionized the fishery shortly after the turn of the century. It took around a decade for this innovation to reach Sitka: according to the late Herman Kitka Sr., in 1914 Tom Sanders Jr. fished a motorized seiner, the COMET, that had been brought up from Puget Sound, for Deep Sea Salmon Company. He outfished everybody, and soon all the seiners had engines.
    Herman Kitka said that the earliest motorized seiners had loose decks of 2 x 12’s which were picked up to empty the hold. This was not the case for more an a couple of years, because of the problem with rain water and snow in the boat in the winter.
    Many of the seiners built in Sitka were financed by the canneries. Sometimes they were built for the cannery, and sometimes they were built for an individual fisherman, who would help build the boat. The canneries had boats built for good producers, obligating the fisherman to fish for that cannery to repay the debt. Some fishermen would eventually buy their boats, but others fished on cannery boats indefinitely.
    In the 20th century there were canneries in Sitka itself  (Pyramid), at Sitkoh Bay (George T. Myers, Chatham), and Lindenberg Head (Todd) in Peril Strait, and at Ford Arm (Deep Sea Salmon Company) on the west side of Chichagof Island.
    The late Herman Kitka, Sr., a Tlingit boatbuilder and fisherman, said that his father, Frank Kitka, built the NECKERBAY, documented 1915, for John Young; OLYMPIC, 1918, for himself; ZINGO, 1918, for John Joseph, financed by the Deep Sea Salmon Company; BUSY BEE, 1919, for George T. Myers (cannery); and the ATLAS, his last boat, for himself in 1920, documented 1922. He also built the PTARMIGAN and the DIXIE, which may have been too small to document.
    He first built in a shop at the old Brady sawmill, near the present Thomsen Harbor. When that building collapsed, he built boats in a shop on Charcoal Island, which had machinery powered by a gas engine. That shop was on the beach below the site of the current Shee Atika Business Center, and burned down before the military took over the island. Frank Kitka built his last boat, the ATLAS, in 1920, on Katlian Street.

Frank Kitka (Photo by Ford Wilke)

    Another Tlingit builder, George Howard, in 1912 or 1914 built his own shop and home on Katlian Street, on the town side of what is now the Seafood Producers Cooperative plant. The shop was replaced by a larger one in 1940. The house and shop were torn down in the summer of 1990.
    George Howard probably built the ACTIVE, documented in 1917, for himself and his sons, and he built the U & I, documented 1919.
Every summer the Howards closed up shop and went fishing. George Howard built the seiner PROGRESS, documented in 1923, for himself, his sons, and son-in-law Andrew Hope.
    Herman Kitka Sr. said that Peter Simpson, who was Tsimshian and who lived and worked at the Cottages, built the DREADNAUGHT, 1915, for Myers Cannery, for Jimmy Keunz; the ALBATROSS, 1917, for John Cameron, another resident of the Cottages; the BARANOFF, 1918, for Ralph Young, of the Cottages; the EAGLE, 1919 for Pyramid Packing Company; the MARY WARD, 1919, for Deep Sea Packing Company for George Ward; and the KATHARINE, 1919, for Deep Sea.
    The Cottages was a model Christian community for Alaska Natives on the Presbyterian mission school grounds. It is adjacent to the Sitka National Historical Park, and Simpson’s boat shop was on the small point of land where Merrill Rock is today.
    Simpson is said to have built the MOONLIGHT, 1918, although the documentation lists her owner, Edward Grant, as the builder. Grant fished the boat into the 1940s, when he was killed aboard the boat when his neck scarf caught in the exposed engine. It was beached on Graveyard Island at Hoonah, until bought by a troller, Pete Moe, who became known as Moonlight Pete.
    The MOONLIGHT is still fishing, and currently for sale; the boat was completely rebuilt in 1979. That owner said that before the rebuild the boat was unusually lightly built, with widely spaced frames, and no floors, the pieces which join the pairs of ribs.  This might indicate the speed with which these boats were built, although it may be a characteristic only of this particular boat.
    Peter Simpson built the troller SMILES, documented in 1920. According to the 1920 census, Cottages residents Raymond James and Simpson’s son Louis Simpson were building boats with Simpson.
     In addition to these boats, Sitka builders documented the NICHOLAI in 1915; the ALMS in 1917; the DORA B.H., the ELSIE, the ESTHER, and the JOHN D. in 1918, and the LOUISE in 1919. That adds up to at least eight boats documented in 1918, and another eight in 1919.
    The surge was partly due to U.S. military purchase of canned salmon for the war effort. Guaranteed prices to fishermen and to canners led to 13 new canneries in southeastern Alaska in 1918, including Pyramid Cannery (Fisherman’s Quay) in Sitka. But after the war, prices dropped, and many canneries closed, which was probably fortunate as the fishing levels were unsustainable.
    This overproduction of fishing boats meant that many were still around during the longline boom years of the 1980s, and some even survive today – a tangible connection to those days  a century ago, when fresh new wooden seiners, and their builders and crews, were the pride of Sitka.
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This article, part of a history of boatbuilding in Sitka by Rebecca Poulson, originally appeared in the newsletter of the Sitka Maritime Heritage Society. Poulson is a professionally certified boatwright and executive dfirector of the SMHS.