The Bergmann Hotel is significant for the role it has played in state and local history; and for commemorating the name of a pioneer Alaskan woman, prominently associated with leading Juneau hotels from 1896 to 1916.
The present capital city of Alaska came into existence with the first major placer gold strike in the Territory, in 1880.
As the placers declined, hard-rock mining developed and eventually these consolidated into two world-famous properties, the Treadwell Mine and the Alaska-Juneau Mine.
Juneau was made the capital in 1900, but the executive offices were not moved from Sitka until 1906. Because of gold, fisheries, shipping and government, Juneau has played a prominent role in Alaska's 19th and 20th Century history.
The Bergmann Hotel, built in 1913, is among the oldest surviving hostelries in Juneau. It was built by Marie E. Bergmann, a German emigrant who came to the Gastineau Channel in 1896 following the death of her husband in Seattle.
Her initial employment was at the Franklin House, a pioneer board-and-rooming establishment for miners. She then worked at the Perseverance Mine and as a nurse at the Simpson Hospital, established in 1886 by a prominent early-day physician.
About 1907, she began managing the Circle City Hotel, owned by businessman George Miller; acquiring the location, she selected a new site, just off the principal business district and central to the leading residential area and built the 50 room, rectangular, three-story, full basement apartment-hotel, which held its grand opening on December 16, 1913.
Her initial hopes, with outside capital, was to build a 64 room structure, steam-heated, with electric lights, hot and cold water in every room, with both baths and showers on every floor, it was considered—even in its scaled down version—as the best in Juneau.
Widow Bergmann, however, did not long enjoy the fruits of her success. Stricken with brain hemorrhage, she died on March 18, 1916. The hotel was left to relatives in Germany, but management was placed with a former employee, Mrs. Mary Bernhofer.
The Alaskan Daily Empire in a front page obituary story, called Mrs. Bergmann "one of the best known and best loved women of the city. . .friend, comforter and counsellor, and often banker, to those in need."