Chignik Fisheries is a historic salmon canning facility on the northwest shore of Chignik Lagoon, southwest of Dago Point, about 44 miles (71 km) south of Port Heiden and 36 miles (58 km) northeast of Perryville, Alaska. Chignik Lagoon is an embayment on the Alaska Peninsula that trends northeast for 8 miles (13 km) to Chignik Bay on the Gulf of Alaska. It was named after Chignik Bay in 1899 by Lieutenant Commander Jefferson F. Moser of the US Navy, aboard the US Bureau of Fisheries steamer Albatross.

The facility was formerly owned and operated as a cannery by Wards Cove Packing Company, which ran from 1911 to the 1960s, and then served as a support facility for the local fishing fleet until 1991. Wards Cove Packing Company was founded in 1928 in Ketchikan and grew from a single canning line to a network of plants in Southeast Alaska, Kodiak, Cook Inlet, Chignik, and Bristol Bay. In 1959, Wards Cove Packing Company merged with Columbia River Packers Association to form Columbia Wards Fisheries. The company is also notable for its role in civil-rights law: the Supreme Court’s ruling in Wards Cove Packing Company versus Atonio (1989) prompted Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which overturned the decision. The facility was closed in 2004.

The Chignik Lagoon Native Corporation seeks to redevelop the Ward’s Cove cannery site to revive fish processing or other seasonal and recreational use. In 2007, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation completed a site assessment to identify environmental concerns. Potential concerns included the old cannery, fuel tank farms, fuel pipelines, generator shed, heating oil aboveground storage tanks, boat storage racks, beach seeps, waste disposal, machine shop, and hazardous building materials. An adjacent landfill may also have contamination. Read more here and here. Explore more of Chignik Fisheries and Chignik Lagoon here: