It was in the early morning hours of March 18th, 1918, that Alaska’s largest mill. Wrangell’s Wilson and Sylvester Sawmill caught fire. It had opened for the 1918 season just two weeks prior.

Just a few years before the fire, the community of Wrangell itself suffered a blaze in 1906 that took most of the downtown area, but the mill, situated in the middle of town, escaped the blaze. The mill’s lumber was used to rebuild the town.

The mill’s luck ran out in March of 1918, when a fierce blaze burned the largest mill on the West Coast to the ground.  The fire was so intense as the mill’s lumber had been drying throughout the winter and was very dry.

The fire took out Wrangell’s largest employer that had 40-70 people working through its annual nine-month season. The mill supplied lumber throughout the territory and also produced the salmon boxes used by the canneries all along the expansive coast of Alaska.

But, within a year, the mill would be completely rebuilt, and by 1919 was producing lumber and salmon boxes for the territory once again.

  1918, fire, sawmill, wrangell