Sitka Articles

Sheet'ká, the Tlingit name, shortens a phrase meaning people on the edge of Shee, their name for Baranof Island. As New Archangel it became the informal capital of Russian America in 1808, and it stayed the American seat of government until the capital moved to Juneau in 1906. By total area it is the largest city in the United States.

The Russian-American Company under Alexander Baranov put up log buildings inside a palisade north of today's town in 1799, naming the post for the Archangel Michael. Tlingit fighters destroyed it in 1802. The site is a National Historic Landmark within Old Sitka State Historical Park.

In 1804 Russian fur hunters and their Aleut allies came back to the area and fought the Tlingit, who had built Shis'kí Noow, the Sapling Fort, near the mouth of the Indian River. The fort site is the heart of Sitka National Historical Park, Alaska's oldest federally designated cultural and historic park.

On October 18, 1867, the Russian flag came down and the American flag went up on the hill where the Russian governors lived, completing the sale of Alaska. Alaska Day is still celebrated in Sitka every October 18.

Finnish laborers brought in by the Russian-American Company built this house in 1841-43 for Ivan Veniaminov, the first Bishop of Alaska, later canonized as St. Innocent. Its upper floor held a chapel and the bishop's rooms; the ground floor was later a print shop and an inn. The Park Service acquired it in 1973.

The cathedral finished in 1848 burned on January 2, 1966. More than 95 percent of its icons were carried out and saved, and the church was rebuilt on the same spot.

The Rev. Dr. Sheldon Jackson gathered many of the Alaska Native objects in this collection and pushed for a building to hold them. Work began in 1895; the state describes it as Alaska's first concrete building and its oldest museum.

Tlingit men founded the Alaska Native Brotherhood in Sitka in 1912 to fight being shut out of restaurants and theaters, and the group went on to win citizenship for Alaska Natives. Its hall on Katlian Street, built over the water in 1914, became a National Historic Landmark in 1987.

The Pioneer Home opened in September 1913 and is the oldest of Alaska's six state homes. Its bronze Prospector, by Alonzo Victor Lewis, took 21 years of fundraising and was dedicated at the 1949 Alaska Day celebration.

Opened in 1972 between downtown and Japonski Island, where the airport is, the 1,255-foot O'Connell Bridge was the first cable-stayed vehicle bridge in the United States. It is named for Mayor John W. O'Connell and became an ASCE civil engineering landmark in 2022.

The Alaska Pulp Corporation ran a pulp mill on Sawmill Cove, about five miles east of town, from 1959 to 1993, with more than 450 local workers at its peak. The city took over the land in 1999 as the Gary Paxton Industrial Park, and two of the mill's clarifier tanks now house Fortress of the Bear.

Chris McGraw built a deep-water dock north of town on the former Old Sitka Dock site in 2011. Once big ships could tie up instead of anchoring, passenger numbers climbed sharply from 2022.

Owned by the Sitka Tribe of Alaska and built in 1997, the community house holds the largest hand-carved house screen in Southeast Alaska. Each summer the Naa Kahídi Dancers perform Tlingit songs and stories there.