Tlingit people had fished and hunted the Mitkof Island coast for more than two thousand years before any of this — fish traps, petroglyphs at Sandy Beach, seasonal camps along the Stikine River — and Mitkof Island still carries that depth underneath the newer Scandinavian story. Buschmann's town grew quickly on top of it: by 1900 the post office, by 1912 the Sons of Norway Hall raised by sixty charter members of Fedrelandet Lodge #23 on pilings over Hammer Slough on Sing Lee Alley — the first Sons of Norway lodge in Alaska, a long gambrel-roofed wood-frame building painted white and red with rosemaling on every shutter. Buschmann himself didn't live to see most of it; he died in 1903, and his sons August and Christian carried the cannery work forward into the Northwestern Fisheries era. The original 1897 cannery has operated continuously ever since under one owner or another — today it's Petersburg Fisheries, still packing the same kind of fish out of the same harbor.
Alaska's Little Norway, on the Wrangell Narrows since 1897. In 1897 a Norwegian fisherman named Peter Buschmann came north out of Washington State and found a deep-water channel cutting between two heavily timbered islands at the south end of what is now called the Inside Passage. The channel was the Wrangell Narrows — a natural saltwater passage running roughly north-to-south between Mitkof Island and Kupreanof Island — and Buschmann, who had been salting and packing fish in Puget Sound since he emigrated from Aure, Norway in 1891, recognized everything about it at once. A fine harbor at the north end of the Narrows, abundant salmon and halibut all around, and not far up the coast, the LeConte Glacier calving clean, hard ice into LeConte Bay — the southernmost tidewater glacier in North America, the perfect natural refrigerant for packing fresh salmon south to Seattle by steamship. He bought forty acres at the head of the Narrows, built a cannery and a sawmill and a dock, and wrote home to his Norwegian friends. They followed him north. By 1900 the town had a post office. By the time the settlement formally incorporated on April 20, 1910, it had earned its nickname: Alaska's Little Norway.
Why People Visit Petersburg Alaska
Petersburg is the rare Alaska town where the heritage is real and the working harbor is still working. Visitors come for Alaska's Little Norway — the 1912 Sons of Norway Hall, the rosemaling, the Little Norway Festival, the Norwegian-American fishing-town identity that hasn't softened into a souvenir. They come for the Wrangell Narrows and the boat day to LeConte Glacier. They come for the largest home-based halibut fleet in Alaska tied up at the harbor a block from downtown. And they come because Petersburg is what a working Southeast Alaska town looks like when the cannery has never stopped running and the locals still mostly know each other. It is compact, walkable, Norwegian, working, and unmistakably Alaska.
