On a sunny day in August, Roblin Davis grips the upper rungs of a ladder that rests against a sturdy tree in his front yard on 11th Street in Juneau. His left arm stretches into the leaves and pulls out a bright red cherry that he drops into a small plastic container looped on a string around his neck.
He is harvesting tart cherries that grow prolifically in the neighborhood known as “The Flats.”
Sleuthing among residents failed to reveal the absolute origin of the fruit trees, as posed to the Juneau Empire by a reader. However, many homeowners speculated about the source of their cherry trees.
Hungry thrushes, robins and ravens devour the ripe fruit. Seeds the size of peppercorns dot the ground and sidewalks. Perhaps, ponder some folks, the pits start new growth after the birds eat them and pass them along.
One homeowner wondered if the early trees came from the Alaska Agricultural Experiment Station, founded in 1898 in Sitka, where suitable vegetable and fruit cultivars were nurtured for Southeast Alaska’s cool, wet climate with a short growing season.
While it was not possible to determine if this is true, other residents knew precisely where their cherry trees came from.
“Under the fence from my neighbor’s yard,” was the cheerful reply from Davis. He calls the large tree where his ladder was propped the “mother” cherry tree; a slightly smaller “granddaughter” cherry tree has grown from the root a few feet away. The trees appear to propagate easily.
Eleventh Street resident Roblin Davis, standing on a ladder propped against a tree in his yard on Friday, Aug. 2, picks ripe red cherries to add to a container looped around his neck on a string. The same technique was used by other cherry pickers a few blocks away on Sunday, Aug. 4. (Laurie Craig / Juneau Empire)
Two old chums who grew up in the neighborhood reminisced separately about childhood life in “The Flats.” Each of them could name most of the families who lived in the houses where they grew up decades ago. Elmer Lindstrom, whose family had Reliable Transfer, listed numerous names recently in a conversation on a Juneau trail. Brent Long, whose parents Maurice and Angie spent 40 years in their 12th Street home starting in 1959, remembered cherry trees being planted along the fence line. Long didn’t eat the cherries he harvested like his brother Craig did, so Brent’s bucket was usually fuller. Their mother made cookies and pies. Long, who lives in Washington State, and Lindstrom reconnected at their 50th Juneau High School reunion a couple of weeks ago.
Other residents have different theories on the cherry trees.
“The cherry trees grow up through the yard and we give the ‘starts’ away,” said C Street resident Richard Bloomquist. He and his wife Melissa live in the home his grandfather Al Bloomquist Sr. moved into in the 1930s or 1940s. It is the same house Richard’s father Al Jr. grew up in.
Richard has strong memories of his grandfather making a special effort with him as they planted their cherry tree together in the 1990s. Grandfather Al Bloomquist Sr., who died in 2007, was born in Juneau in 1914.
At the time of Richard’s grandfather’s birth in 1914, the neighborhood was in its early stages of development. Unlike much of steep early Juneau, the new Casey-Shattuck Addition was laid out in a careful grid of square numerical and alphabetical streets on flat ground created on the Gold Creek alluvial fan.
The neighborhood development was triggered by two key factors in 1913: first, the consolidation of small gold mines into large corporate plants that proposed to employ many wage workers, and, second, the promotion of a flat wood-planked roadway to be built on elevated pilings across the tidelands, opening new access.
The first component was the economic incentive envisioned by the Alaska Juneau Gold Mining Company at Gold Creek and the Alaska Gastineau Mining Company at Sheep Creek. Both companies were constructing huge processing mills that would require a large, stable work force. Housing was necessary for them. City leaders wanted to encourage families to live in Juneau so the companies pledged to not build bunkhouses and mess halls that would keep employees isolated away from Juneau’s businesses, schools and other community endeavors.
The second part was a proposed road from the core of downtown toward the new housing properties. The effort began on May 10, 1913 when local petitioners asked the city council to open “a thoroughfare” westward starting at the base of Main Street “from the Pacific Coast [steamship] dock along the waterfront to the beach in front of the lighting plant,” reported the Alaska Daily Empire. Today the route is known as Willoughby Avenue. The Alaska Electric Light and Power Company’s “lighting plant,” upgraded and modernized, still exists today in the large blue building on Capital Avenue.
A view of 12th Street looking toward Last Chance Basin with cherry tree branches arching over the sidewalk.(Laurie Craig / Juneau Empire)
The leader of the road proposal group was W.W. Casey who pledged $500 as a first “subscriber.” The city council meeting ended with a total subscriber commitment of $1,925. Casey had a dairy farm below Calhoun Avenue in the flat area surrounding Gold Creek. He and his partner had already proposed the housing development bearing their names.
The Casey-Shattuck Addition land was located on patented mining claims issued for the Shattuck-Farnum Placer signed on June 30, 1904 by the president of the United States based on a deed from Alaska Electric Light and Power, founded in 1893.
Before the planked road was built all wagon traffic used Calhoun Avenue which was perched on the steep hillside above the tidelands. A small bridge crossed over Gold Creek near what is now Cope Park. The new Willoughby Avenue road would become contentious as it cut off access to the tidelands that fronted Alaska Native homes in the Aak’w Village area for residents’ canoes which were used for subsistence food gathering. Access was guaranteed by an 1884 law but was eventually overturned in a 1948 court judgment in “United States v. 10.95 Acres of Land in Juneau” despite a strong defense by Alaska Native attorney William Paul, Jr.
The sale of lots in the Casey-Shattuck Addition was aggressively promoted in advertisements through the summer of 1913 in the Alaska Daily Empire. In one front page advertisement on Aug. 13, 1913, the text read, “Let This Sink In: Juneau must provide room for 5,000 more people almost immediately.”
Several sentences list multiple pending construction projects, then the narrative closes with, “What is Juneau doing to provide housing for all these people?” The promoters offer building lots for sale on “easy terms,” on a “beautiful, level tract with easy and comfortable access. Get while the getting is good.”
The campaign proved very successful. Within four weeks, 72 of the 200 lots had sold, according to a story published in the Empire on Sept. 9, 1913. Twelve houses had been started and “more would have been started” if not for “a lack of lumber.” Building lots measured about 40 feet by 90 feet, and sold for between $400 and $700. An extra incentive was pitched by the promoters: “If not sold here, lots will be offered in Seattle, Spokane and Butte.”
In the early days of the Casey-Shattuck Addition, today’s abundant cherry trees may have been the dream of future homeowners. It’s also possible that some of the early miners brought fruit tree stock from “the old country.”
“Cherries originated in Anatolia,” wrote David Lendrum, manager of local nursery Landscape Alaska and landscape superintendent at the University of Alaska Southeast. In an email he said, “The Chinese have been cultivating them for 4,000 years. Greeks and Romans, too, but in Eastern Europe, where the cultures meshed together they came west into Europe and ultimately to North America by the early 1700s.” He noted there are also cherry trees “on Telephone Hill which may have come from Eastern European miners…horticulture being one of the highly respected skills of that era.”
Lendrum agrees with Flats area residents who say the trees propagate easily. He said the species “like Montmorency, the most widely planted cherry in the world, instead of the sweet cherries like Bing or Queen Anne which are much less hardy than the sour ones,” may do best here.
This writer can attest to the 12th Street cherries being tart. A taste of a bright red cherry brings a puckering expression, but most harvesters don’t eat the cherries fresh off the tree. They prepare them in pies, jams and jellies with plenty of sugar added to create sweetness.
Marc Wheeler, formerly of Coppa, and his “Flats” neighbor Nancy Hemenway proudly show 50 pounds of cherries they harvested during the bumper-crop summer of 2023. Wheeler created cherry ice cream for his restaurant customers that year. (Laurie Craig / Juneau Empire)
One specialty cherry product was ice cream. During the bumper-crop year of 2023, Marc Wheeler, former co-owner with Jessica Paris of Coppa, the popular Flats neighborhood coffee shop and restaurant, plucked 50 pounds of red cherries with help from his neighbor Nancy Hemenway. Wheeler used the cherries to flavor homemade ice cream for Coppa customers. While Wheeler has moved on to a new job after selling Coppa, he will be publishing the cherry ice cream recipe in an upcoming blog cookbook at www.candiedsalmonandrhubarb.com. The buckets full of cherries for the ice cream production came from several willing-owners’ Casey-Shattuck Addition trees.
The importation of European trees is true for a graceful willow in Nancy and Andy Hemenway’s 10th Street yard. According to lore passed from previous owners, the builder of the Hemenway home’s foundation was a stone mason from Scotland who came to Juneau to build the Salmon Creek dam. He returned later from the old country with his new Scottish bride who brought a tangible memory of home in the form of a Golden Willow tree sprout. The tree now towers over the house.
The Flats neighborhood today exudes the comfortable residential future envisioned and platted more than a century ago on the Gold Creek floodplain. After a disastrous flood in 1918 wiped out some houses and lots, the creek was channelized between concrete walls starting in 1919. The perimeter land was stabilized and extended beyond the beach line. Streets and sidewalks were paved for safe transit. Service alleyways keep garage access and trash cans discreetly hidden. The once-busy baseball field now houses the nine-story federal building constructed in the 1960s. Most of the small homes resemble the original structures built during Juneau’s boom years. It is the classic close-knit American dream neighborhood of white-picket fences where residents know each other and invite neighbors to pick cherries from their trees.
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The origin of this article is a question from a Juneau Empire reader who asked a history-mystery question about why there are so many cherry trees along 12th Street. Details about the neighborhood can be found in an extensive City and Borough of Juneau historic inventory report titled “Casey-Shattuck Neighborhood Building Survey, December 2004.” The Library of Congress online newspaper catalog Chronicling America provided most of the historical background for this article.
• Contact Laurie Craig at laurie.craig@juneauempire.com.
