About this place
A Historically Important Place
Taku Harbor sits on Stephens Passage roughly 25 miles southeast of Juneau on the mainland coast of southeast Alaska. Accessible only by water or floatplane, it is one of the more historically layered anchorages in the region. It likely was continuously continuously by Tlingit people from the Taku and Stikeen rivers for centuries, briefly occupied by the Hudson’s Bay Company in the 1840s, one of the most populous communities of the region before the discovery of gold in present day Juneau, and home to a salmon cannery that operated into the 1940s.
Today most of the coastline is a Alaska State Marine Park, offering protected anchorage, a float and moorage maintained by Juneau Docks and Harbor, and rugged trails through regrown forest that obscure the remains of all that came before.
Six eras
A Harbor of Many Stories
Precontact – present
Tlingit Settlement
A Taku Kwáan village site at the far end of the harbor, likely used both seasonally and year-round across many generations.
1840 – 1843
Fort Durham
The Hudson’s Bay Company’s short-lived trading post, built to compete with Russian America and counter Tlingit middleman trade.
1880s
Presbyterian Mission
Missionary activity reaching into Taku Inlet as part of Sheldon Jackson’s broader effort to establish schools and churches across Alaska.
1890s – mid-20th c.
Salmon Cannery
A commercial cannery processing pink and sockeye salmon from Taku Inlet, part of southeast Alaska’s cannery boom era.
1945 – 1980s
Glacial exploration and homesteading
Exploration of glacial.
1983 – present
State Marine Park
Legistative foresight created marine parks in Alaska.
The place today
Visiting Taku Harbor
The harbor is reachable by small boat from Juneau in calm conditions, though Taku Inlet is known for strong outflow winds — the Taku wind — that can make passage hazardous. The Juneau Docks and Harbors float provides moorage, and improvised trails run through the former cannery grounds.
Marine park information: Taku Harbor State Marine Park is managed by the Alaska Division of Parks and Outdoor Recreation. A cabin avaialble by reservation. Bears— both brown and black— and wolves are active in the area. The anchorage is exposed to southeast winds; the inner cove offers better protection.
The forest has largely reclaimed the cannery site, but pilings, machinery fragments, and building foundations remain visible. The location of Fort Durham has been fully forested and is design is only known from archaeological investigation led by Wallace Olsen of the University of Alaska in 1994. The Fort Durham Site was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1978.