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.
Walk Petersburg today and the layers stack on one waterfront. The Sons of Norway Hall is still there on its pilings, its shutters still rosemaling-painted, still the center of the town's Norwegian cultural life. The Valhalla — a life-sized Viking ship replica — sits in Bojer Wikan Fishermen's Memorial Park at the south end of Sing Lee Alley, and every May around Syttende Mai, Norwegian Constitution Day, the Little Norway Festival "floats" the Valhalla through the streets. The harbor still has the largest home-based halibut fleet in Alaska. The Wrangell Narrows still threads north-to-south through it all, with the Tongass National Forest standing in dark green walls along both sides. Alaska's Little Norway, on the Wrangell Narrows since 1897.
Why People Visit Petersburg Alaska
- Walk Sing Lee Alley and the Sons of Norway Hall — the 1912 white-and-red gambrel-roofed wood-frame building on pilings over Hammer Slough, the first Sons of Norway lodge in Alaska, still in continuous community use, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.
- Visit Bojer Wikan Fishermen's Memorial Park at the south end of Sing Lee Alley — the nine-foot bronze fisherman sculpture, the Valhalla Viking ship replica, and the roll of Petersburg fishermen lost at sea.
- Take a day boat tour to LeConte Bay and the LeConte Glacier — the southernmost tidewater glacier in North America, calving icebergs the size of small buildings into a long fjord roughly 25 miles southeast of town.
- Visit the Clausen Memorial Museum just off the harbor for the Tlingit fish-trap and petroglyph collections, the cannery-era industrial history, the world-record king salmon, and the original Cape Decision Lighthouse Fresnel lens.
- Walk the North Boat Harbor and South Harbor — the largest home-based halibut fleet in Alaska, plus working salmon and crab boats, and one of the best harbor walks in Southeast Alaska.
- Hike Three Lakes Trail on Mitkof Island in the Tongass National Forest — three small lakes linked by boardwalk through the muskeg, blueberry-thick in late summer, a classic Southeast Alaska temperate-rainforest walk.
- Walk the Sandy Beach Recreation Area south of town to see Tlingit petroglyphs and the remains of stone fish traps visible at low tide — Mitkof Island's pre-1897 layer.
- Cross to Kupreanof on a skiff or kayak — the smaller island community right across the Narrows, no roads connecting to it, a five-minute crossing from the Petersburg harbor.
- Come back for the Little Norway Festival in mid-May for the Valhalla parade, the rosemaling on every shutter, lutefisk and lefse on the menu, and the Leikarring folk-dancers in costume.
- Petersburg is also a natural stop on the Inside Passage between Juneau, Sitka, Ketchikan, and Wrangell — each town its own character, each a separate ferry day.
