Chronology
Timeline
Precontact – present
Tlingit settlement at Taku Inlet
The Taku Kwáan occupy the Taku River drainage and inlet, using the harbor mouth as a seasonal and semi-permanent village site. Salmon fishing, eulachon harvesting from the Taku River, and maritime trade define the economy.
1840
Fort Durham established
The Hudson’s Bay Company constructs a trading post at or near Taku Harbor, intended to tap the interior fur trade and challenge both Russian America and the Tlingit middlemen who controlled access to inland trading networks.
1843
Fort Durham abandoned
The post closes after only three years, likely due to a combination of difficult relations with local Tlingit groups, competition with the Russian-American Company, and insufficient returns from the fur trade at this location.
1867
Alaska Purchase
The United States acquires Alaska from Russia. The region around Taku Harbor transitions to American jurisdiction, though federal presence in remote southeast Alaska remains minimal for years.
1880s – 1900s
Presbyterian missionary activity
As part of Sheldon Jackson’s Alaska mission network, Presbyterian missionaries extend into Taku Inlet, conducting services and establishing connections with Tlingit communities. The mission era overlaps with the cannery period.
c. 1890
Salmon cannery established
A commercial cannery begins operations at Taku Harbor, processing pink and sockeye salmon from Taku Inlet. The 1890 U.S. Census map of southeast Alaska documents the facility and surrounding area.
Mid-20th century
Cannery closes
Like most small canneries in southeast Alaska, the Taku Harbor facility eventually ceases operation as the industry consolidates. Buildings deteriorate and forest begins to reclaim the site.
Present
Alaska State Marine Park
Taku Harbor is managed as a state marine park, preserving the anchorage and trails. Cannery pilings and machinery fragments remain visible. The site of Fort Durham is incompletely documented on the ground.
Tlingit history
The Taku Kwáan
The people of Taku Inlet — the Taku Kwáan — are a clan grouping within the Tlingit nation whose territory centers on the Taku River drainage and the inlet that bears their name. The river itself was one of the most productive eulachon fisheries in southeast Alaska, and the oily fish rendered into grease that was traded widely across the region along established “grease trails.”
The harbor at the inlet mouth was a natural gathering place: protected anchorage, access to salmon runs, proximity to the river. Tlingit use of the site predates European contact by centuries and continues into the present in the form of subsistence fishing and cultural connections to the land.
The arrival of Russian traders in the late eighteenth century and then the Hudson’s Bay Company in the 1840s placed Tlingit groups in the middle of a fur trade competition they navigated strategically. Tlingit communities had long controlled access to interior trading networks, and the HBC’s attempt to bypass those networks with Fort Durham was one reason the post struggled.
Hudson’s Bay Company
Fort Durham, 1840–1843
Fort Durham was one of several HBC posts established in the panhandle region during the period of the lease agreement with the Russian-American Company, under which Britain gained trading rights along the Alaska coast. The post was named for a senior figure in the HBC hierarchy and was intended to draw the fur trade away from Russian posts to the north and to compete directly with Tlingit middleman traders.
The fort’s exact location within or near Taku Harbor is a matter of ongoing historical inquiry. Documentary sources — HBC correspondence, journals of chief traders, and later survey records — place it at the harbor but with insufficient precision to pin it definitively on the landscape. The relatively short occupation (three years) and the subsequent overlay of the cannery complex have made physical identification difficult.
Research note: The 1890 U.S. Census map of southeast Alaska, held by the Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, provides one of the earliest cartographic records of the Taku Harbor area following American acquisition. It does not depict Fort Durham directly — the post had been abandoned nearly half a century earlier — but offers context for the geographic setting. See the resources page for the ARK link to the high-resolution map.
The abandonment in 1843 appears to have been driven by multiple factors: tensions with Tlingit groups unwilling to cede their intermediary role in the trade, competition from the Russian-American Company at Sitka and elsewhere, and the limited returns relative to the cost of maintaining a remote post. The HBC’s Alaska coastal operations continued from other posts, but Fort Durham was not revived.
Mission era
Presbyterian Mission Activity
The late nineteenth century brought American missionary activity into southeast Alaska on a significant scale, driven in large part by Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian minister who served as General Agent of Education for Alaska from 1885. Jackson’s network of mission schools and churches reached into many remote Tlingit communities, combining education, religious conversion, and — controversially — suppression of traditional cultural practices.
The mission presence at Taku Harbor and Inlet was part of this broader effort, concurrent with the cannery era. Relationships between mission workers, cannery operators, and Tlingit communities were complex and not always harmonious.
Industrial era
The Salmon Cannery
Southeast Alaska’s salmon cannery industry expanded rapidly from the 1880s onward, with small canneries appearing at productive fishing locations throughout the Inside Passage. Taku Inlet, with its runs of pink and sockeye salmon, was well-suited to support a facility. The cannery at Taku Harbor was documented in the 1890 census enumeration of the region.
Cannery labor in this era was typically a mix of Indigenous workers, Chinese contract laborers (under the contract labor system that preceded the “Iron Chink” mechanization), and white fishermen and managers. The seasonal nature of the work meant that the harbor would have been intensely active during summer months and largely quiet the rest of the year.
The physical remains of the cannery — pilings in the water, concrete foundations, fragments of machinery — are the most visible historical layer at the site today. The forest succession following abandonment has been extensive, with large spruce and hemlock now growing through and around the former industrial footprint.