Kodiak was settled long before statehood, with Indigenous Alutiiq people thriving on fishing and hunting on the archipelago for thousands of years before contact. Russian traders established a post at Three Saints Bay in 1784 and moved it to Paul's Harbor in 1792, making Kodiak the first capital of Russian Alaska. When the United States purchased Alaska in 1867, Kodiak continued as a hub for fishing, canning, and maritime trade. Its founding reflects both Native endurance and frontier ambition. The town's story highlights survival in rugged environments, where storms, whales, and fisheries defined life. Kodiak's heritage is rooted in wilderness, resilience, and the ability to thrive where ocean and frontier meet.
In 1792, the Russian fur trader Alexander Baranov moved the company headquarters from Three Saints Bay at the south end of the island to a deep, defensible harbor on the northeast coast and named the new settlement Pavlovskaya Gavan — Paul's Harbor. For the next twelve years, until the capital moved to Sitka in 1804, this was the capital of Russian Alaska — and Kodiak today remains the oldest continuously inhabited town in the state. The Alutiiq (Sugpiaq) people had lived on the Kodiak Archipelago for at least seven thousand years before the Russians arrived, and the Alutiiq name for Kodiak is Sun'aq. Vitus Bering and Aleksei Chirikov sighted the island in 1741 during the Second Kamchatka Expedition, Stepan Glotov became the first Russian to land in 1763, and Grigory Shelikhov — the "Russian Columbus" — founded the first permanent Russian settlement in North America at Three Saints Bay in 1784. The Russian Orthodox spiritual mission to North America arrived at Kodiak in 1794, and among the monks was Saint Herman of Alaska, who spent most of his life on nearby Spruce Island, founded an orphanage and school for Alutiiq children, and was canonized in 1970 as the first Orthodox saint of North America and the patron saint of Alaska. The Russian-American Company magazin — the warehouse Baranov's men built around 1808 to store sea otter pelts — stands today as the Baranov Museum, the oldest Russian-era wooden structure in Alaska, a National Historic Landmark since 1962. Holy Resurrection Cathedral, whose parish was founded in 1794, is the oldest Russian Orthodox parish in the Americas, and Saint Herman's relics rest there today. The United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867. On June 6-8, 1912, the Novarupta-Katmai eruption — the largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century — buried Kodiak in up to eighteen inches of ash, and residents were evacuated to the U.S. Revenue Cutter Manning. On March 27, 1964 — Good Friday — the M9.2 Great Alaska Earthquake, the largest ever recorded in North America, sent a series of thirty-foot tsunami waves into the harbor that leveled downtown Kodiak, the fishing fleet, the canneries, fifteen lives, and eleven million dollars in damage. By 1968 the rebuilt fleet had made Kodiak the number-one U.S. fishing port by dollar value. The Coast Guard took over the former Naval Operating Base in 1971; Coast Guard Base Kodiak is today the largest U.S. Coast Guard installation by area. The island itself is 3,588 square miles, the second-largest in the United States after the Big Island of Hawaiʻi — green from spring through fall under sixty-seven inches of annual rain, and the only place on Earth where the Kodiak brown bear (Ursus arctos middendorffi) walks. They call it the Emerald Isle.
Why People Visit Kodiak Island Alaska
Kodiak Island offers the deepest Russian-Alaska heritage stack of any city in the state — the 1792 Baranov founding, the Baranov Museum's c. 1808 walls, the 1794 Holy Resurrection parish, the Saint Herman relics, the Alutiiq Museum's 7,000-year archive. It offers the only habitat of the Kodiak brown bear, the second-largest island in the United States, the 1.9-million-acre Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, Fort Abercrombie's WWII landscape, the largest U.S. Coast Guard installation by area, the working St. Paul Harbor of one of the top U.S. fishing ports, the 1912 Novarupta and 1964 Good Friday Earthquake history under the green spruce and rain, and a sister Russian-Alaska heritage in Sitka 240 miles east across the Gulf of Alaska — Kodiak and Sitka together carry the Russian-American Company story from its founding to its end. This is the Emerald Isle. Working town. Working harbor. Walking-bear country.
