Haynes-Parker, Edith Armenthia

Biography

Edith Armenthia Haynes-Parker married Abraham Lincoln Parker. Their daughter, Inez May Parker-White, was born in Portland, Oregon, on October 10, 1895.

The Parker family moved north from Portland, Oregon, to Skagway, Alaska, in June of 1899 while traveling to the Atlin mining district during the period of activity following the Klondike gold rush.

The family later relocated to Juneau, Alaska, in April 1913, becoming part of the growing community of early residents of Southeast Alaska.

Sources

• Family historical records

Primary Name: Parker, Abraham Lincoln

Filed as: Parker, Abraham Lincoln

Also known as: A. Lincoln Parker

Occupation / Association: Early Alaska resident

Associated places: Portland, Oregon; Skagway, Alaska; Atlin, British Columbia, Canada; Juneau, Alaska

Keywords: Abraham Lincoln Parker, Edith Armenthia Haynes Parker, Inez May Parker White, Parker family Juneau Alaska, Skagway Alaska families, Atlin gold rush families, early Juneau families

Biography

Abraham Lincoln Parker was an early Alaska resident who lived in several communities during the years surrounding the Klondike gold rush.

He married Edith Armenthia Haynes Parker. Their daughter, Inez May Parker White, was born in Portland, Oregon, on October 10, 1895.

In June 1899, the Parker family left Portland and traveled north to Skagway, Alaska, during the height of the Klondike gold rush. From there, they continued on to Atlin in British Columbia.

In April 1913, the family moved to Juneau, Alaska, where they became part of the growing community in the territorial capital.

Sources

Family historical records

Primary Name: McDonald, Elizabeth

Filed as: McDonald, Elizabeth

Also known as: Elizabeth Marshall Hucheson; Elizabeth Hucheson McDonald

Occupation / Association: Charter Member, Pioneers of Alaska Juneau Women's Auxiliary No. 6

Associated places: Douglas, Alaska; Juneau, Alaska; Seattle, Washington; Atlin, British Columbia; Marshfield, Oregon; West Virginia

Keywords: Elizabeth McDonald Juneau Alaska, Elizabeth Marshall Hucheson, John F McDonald Douglas Alaska, Douglas Alaska pioneer families, Pioneers of Alaska Juneau Women's Auxiliary charter members, early Douglas Alaska residents

Biography

Elizabeth McDonald was a Charter Member of the Pioneers of Alaska, Juneau Women’s Auxiliary No. 6.

She was born Elizabeth Marshall Hucheson in November 1858 in West Virginia to Agnes Henry and Robert M. Hucheson.

In 1875, she married John F. McDonald in Marshfield, Oregon. The couple lived in Seattle, Washington, for approximately twenty years and later spent two years in Atlin, British Columbia, before moving to the Gastineau Channel region. In 1899, they settled in Douglas, Alaska.

John McDonald served the community for eighteen years as the city marshal of Douglas.

Elizabeth and John had four children: Annie, born in 1877 in Oregon; Agnes, born in 1879 in Washington; Ruth Irene, born in July 1892; and Elizabeth Ione, born in November 1896.

Elizabeth McDonald died on February 20, 1933, in Seattle, Washington.

Sources

1910 U.S. Federal Census, Douglas, Alaska.

Biographies of Alaska-Yukon Pioneers 1850–1950, Volume 2, p. 202, Ed Ferrell.

Alaska Daily Empire, February 21, 1933.

Washington Death Certificate.

Inez May Parker White was a Charter Member of Juneau Igloo No. 6.

She was born in Portland, Oregon, on October 10, 1895, to Abraham Lincoln Parker and Edith Armenthia Haynes Parker. The family moved to Skagway, Alaska, in June 1899 on their way to Atlin and later relocated to Juneau in April 1913.

She married William Charles White on September 2, 1916, in Douglas. They had nine children:

Henrietta May White, born December 19, 1917, in Juneau;
Charles Benjamin White, born December 17, 1918, in California;
Gloria Edith White, born August 27, 1921, in Seattle;
Dorothy Annabelle White, born March 19, 1923, in Juneau;
Genevieve Williamina White, born May 9, 1924, in Juneau;
Anna Louise White, born about 1928 in Alaska;
Glen Edward White, born June 13, 1929, in Juneau;
Alice G. White, born about 1933 in Alaska;
William L. White Jr. was born about 1935 in Alaska.

In the early 1940s, she and her husband established the Riverside Lodge at Gustavus, which later became the Gustavus Inn. She divorced William White around 1945.

She married Archie M. Chase on February 29, 1948, in Gustavus. His son, Eugene Sylvester Chase (born June 10, 1921, in Omaha, Nebraska), was from his previous marriage to Mildred Lightfoot.

Inez died on January 13, 1977, in Snohomish, Washington, and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Juneau.

Sources

1910 U.S. Federal Census, Skagway
1920 U.S. Federal Census, Oakland, California
1930 and 1940 U.S. Federal Census, Juneau
Gastineau Channel Memories 1880–1959, p. 390
Pioneers of Alaska Membership Application
U.S. Social Security Applications and Claims Index

The MacKinnon Apartments is a historic apartment building at 236 Third Street. The building is a three-story wood-frame structure, finished in stucco with corner quoining and a dentillated cornice.

The MacKinnon Apartments provided modern housing in Alaska's capital and largest city, and is representative of the size and scale of the buildings constructed during the boom that occurred in Juneau during the 1920s.

When it opened in 1925, it was 80 feet (24 m) long and housed six single-bedroom and 12 studio apartments. In 1959, 20 feet (6.1 m) allowed five more studio units to be added. The building is representative of Juneau's boom years in the period between World Wars I and II, 1921 to 1939, which been defined as Juneau's Peak Gold Mining Era.

During that period, the town was the center for the territorial government, for the Alaska-Juneau Gold Mining Company's huge hard rock operations, for salmon and halibut commercial fishermen, and for supplying southeast Alaska.

Following placer gold discoveries in Silver Bow Basin in 1880, prospectors and businessmen established the town of Juneau. Within a decade, companies organized to mine the hard rock gold deposits in the area. Between 1880 and 1944, the three major mining companies in the Juneau area produced $158 million in gold. The Alaska Juneau Gold Mining Company was the largest low grade ore gold producer in the world from 1910 to 1944.

Juneau quickly grew to be the largest community in southeast Alaska. In 1920, with a population of 3,058, it was the largest city in Alaska. The federal government designated Juneau the capital for the District of Alaska in 1900, although the move from Sitka was not made until 1906, and in 1912 designated it the capital for the Territory of Alaska.

After a cold storage plant opened in 1913, Juneau became the home port for a number of fishermen. The timber industry flourished with the building of a sawmill around 1910. Juneau became the regional trading center for communities in southeast Alaska. Steamships arrived and departed regularly.

In the summer months, steamships brought visitors to town. World War I created shortages of skilled labor to work in the mines and materials needed for mine operations. Production slowed. After the war, with new capital and improvements in technology, the Alaska-Juneau Gold Mining Company was profitable and expanding operations. As a result, the town prospered. Juneau business people invested in new, more substantial buildings. One of the new buildings was the three story MacKinnon Apartments.

Lauchlin "Lockie" MacKinnon, an immigrant from Nova Scotia, constructed the apartment building. He came to Alaska in 1886, MacKinnon drifted around mining camps in Alaska and the Yukon, working as a miner and businessman. For a few years in the 1890s he mined at Porcupine north of Haines. In 1893, he crossed the Chilkoot Trail to seek gold in the Fortymile.

Back in Juneau, in 1895 and 1896 he and George Miller, his partner at Porcupine, built and operated the Circle City Hotel on Third Street. The hotel had eighty rooms, a bar and dining room.

He married Martha Maline Lokke, who came to work at the hotel, in April 1896. The family continued to move around the north, spending several years at Atlin, B.C. and in the Fairbanks area, before settling in Juneau around 1911. Back in Juneau, MacKinnon managed the Zynda Hotel, later known as the Juneau Hotel, on Main Street.

In the 1920s, MacKinnon sensed that apartments were replacing boarding houses and hotels, and built the MacKinnon Apartments. He and his wife lived in an apartment in the building until their deaths in the late 1940s.

The MacKinnon Investment Company prospectus appeared August 17, 1925, seeking investors in a three-story frame apartment house to be located at the corner of Third and Franklin Streets.

An article in Stroller's Weekly, a local newspaper, dated October 10, 1925, noted that the new MacKinnon Apartments offered numerous modern conveniences. In particular, the article said the builder wired each apartment for electricity.

After his second term as territorial governor ended in 1933, George Parks lived in the MacKinnon Apartments for three years. The building has been continuously used as an apartment house since construction.

Sons J. Simpson MacKinnon and Donald L. MacKinnon operated the apartment house after their parents' deaths. In 1959, perhaps anticipating the increased need for housing in the new state's capital, they added five studio units to the back of the building. Other than this addition, the building has not been significantly changed since its construction.

The apartment building is located two blocks outside of the Juneau Downtown Historic District, which were listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. The McKinnon Apartments were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.

National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form

McKinnon Apartments Photos

The Alaskan Hotel is the oldest operating hotel in the Capital City of Juneau, and is among the oldest in continous operation in Alaska.

It is associated with events that have made significant contributions to local and state history; and is an excellent architectural example of the transitional change between 19th and early 20th century.

Although Juneau came into being as a placer gold boom camp, in 1880, unlike many subsequent "boom and bust" camps, it became apparent that a city of some consequence would develop here. Placers, expectedly, were soon mined out; but the presence of vast deposits of quartz lode was established.

This developed into two large world- famous hard-rock mining and milling properties—the Treadwell Mines on adjacent Douglas Island, and the Alaska-Juneau Gold Mining Company —whose extensive surface works were within view of the Alaskan Hotel when it was built.

Juneau also diversified. It had five of the 27 newspapers in Alaska in 1907. It became a regional shipping and distribution point, with extensive docks and warehouses; fisheries, hydro-electric power, banking and lumbering adding to the economic affluence.

In 1900 the Territorial capital was moved from Sitka; Juneau also became one of the three District Court division headquarters; and in 1909, one of four. The City incorporated at that time.

The capital move from Sitka was slow, and occupied almost the first decade. Indeed the present capital building, although partially funded in 1911, was not completed until 1931.

A governor's mansion was planned, and several other executive buildings were built or leased, during the first decade, as government became an important part of Juneau's cosmopolitan life style.

By 1905 the population of Juneau and Douglas had exceeded 6,000 and was growing. The first Territorial Legislature convened in 1913. As a frontier mining camp, Juneau had developed a coterie of miner's boarding and rooming houses; but few hotels.

In the earliest years, the few transient hostelries— Franklin House, Caine, Circle City and Central Hotels were more in the pattern of sourdough roadhouses. Franklin House, and Caine were upgraded and the Occidental and Gastineau added. There was an obvious need for more modern and quality hostelries.

It was known that Marie Bergmann, associated with two of the older hotels since 1896, was seeking outside financing for a 64 room structure. Into this breach, in 1912, stepped an interesting triuvirate: Jules B. Caro, promoter-entrepreneur, and the McCloskey brothers, James and John.

Veteran miners of the Canadian Cariboo, the McCloskey's had finally struck a rich pay-streak in the $25,000,000 diggings at Atlin, across the mountains northeast of Juneau in British Columbia. They acquired a prime location, next door to the declining Central, in close proximity to the steamship docks and central to the business district.

Ground was broken in late 1912; and the well-furnished, attractive modern hotel opened with a champagne gala on September 1, 1913.

Its place in the community was noted in an editorial under the masthead of the Daily Alaska Dispatch:

THE NEW HOTEL The owners and lessees of the Alaskan Hotel are to be congratulated at giving Juneau a modern hostelry. Juneau has needed more hotels. Our old time favorite, the Occidental, has worked faithfully to accommodate an overflowing town during the past twelve months. With the new Caine hotel there should be ample hotel accommodations for the traveling public until next spring. There is room in Juneau for all the new hotels. All will do their share and the traveling public will not be forced to seek shelter here and there, much to their discomfort.

A pioneer resident—then a teenager—Trevor Davis, recalls his plate-glass observation of the exciting Grand Opening: the McCloskey brothers milling among a well-dressed crowd, shaking magnums of champagne, the corks aimed at the newly-installed chandeliers and the gleaming ceiling of the lobby. Thereafter the McCloskey's maintained an extremely low and silent profile.

The Hotel opened under a management arrangement with P.L. Gemmett as President and Manager and F.H. McCoy, Secretary-Treasurer. In 1915, they were replaced by M.P. Goodman and E.E. Burlock, and in 1918 by a single manager, A.T. Spatz.

James McCloskey then assumed his first and only active management, for three years; until a long-term lease arrangement with local businessmen Charles Miller and Mike Pusich was announced.

After 18 months this was cancelled and Dave Housel assumed management until eventual sale by the McCloskey's. Management, thereafter, stabilized.

The Bergmann Hotel, which opened within four months after the Alaskan, quickly found its roll as an apartment-residential hotel. Later generations saw the building of the substantial Baranof, further up Franklin Street, and most recently The Prospector and Hilton.

By this time the Alaskan had become the Northlander. Now under new management and its original name, a restored Alaskan Hotel looks forward to perpetuating its landmark status into the second century of Juneau's history.

National Historic Register Nomination Form