Port Wakefield is an abandoned cannery on the northeast coast of Raspberry Island, about 30 miles (48 km) northwest of Kodiak and 14 miles (23 km) north-northwest of Port Lions, Alaska. The Kodiak Archipelago, which includes Raspberry Island, has been inhabited by Alutiiq Sugpiaq people for at least 7,000 years, and the region holds more than 2,500 documented archaeological sites, most reflecting Alutiiq settlement. Port Wakefield began in the 1930s, when Lee H. Wakefield, whose family ran a salmon-canning firm called Apex Fish Company in Anacortes, Washington, relocated the business to Raspberry Island and opened a herring-reduction and saltery plant called Wakefield Fisheries.

In 1939, as herring and salmon stocks declined, Wakefield’s sons, Howard, Lavern, and Lowell, began catching and processing king crab. Lowell A. Wakefield devised a method of flash-freezing cooked king crab that preserved its flavor better than canning, and in 1945 he founded a separate venture, later renamed Wakefield Seafoods, to build out the business. After the second world war, Port Wakefield grew quickly: workers and their families moved in, and new buildings went up for processing, cold storage, housing, a schoolhouse, and a church. By 1955 about 100 people lived there, and the Wakefield operation accounted for 85% of America’s king crab catch, at a time when Alaska’s entire industry landed only about 8 million pounds of crab a year.

The facility was partly destroyed by the magnitude 9.2 earthquake of March 1964, and by the summer of 1966 all salvageable buildings had been moved to Peregrebni Point, which was linked by causeway to harbor facilities in Port Lions on Kodiak Island. The original site on Raspberry Island was abandoned, and Wakefield sold the property to three former cannery employees, who used it as a hunting camp. In 1996 the Ivie family, led by Mike Ivie, bought the land and began restoring the former cannery site as a private fishing and hunting lodge, now operated as Raspberry Island Lodge. Most of the rest of Raspberry Island belongs to Afognak Native Corporation, an Alaska Native village corporation. A 1965 documentary on the Alaskan king crab fishery shows the Port Wakefield cannery buildings at about the 14:52 mark (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGqntYil67c&ab_channel=PeriscopeFilm). Read more here and here. Explore more of Port Wakefield and Raspberry Island here: