Port Vita is an abandoned herring-reduction plant and saltery on Raspberry Strait, on the northeastern coast of Raspberry Island, about 31 miles (50 km) northwest of Kodiak and 15 miles (24 km) northwest of Port Lions, Alaska. The island is 18 miles (29 km) long, with a width ranging from 3 miles (4.8 km) to 8 miles (12.9 km) and a high point of 3,300 feet (1,006 m). Part of the Kodiak Archipelago in the Gulf of Alaska, it has the Shelikof Strait to the northwest and the Kupreanof Strait, which separates it from Kodiak Island, to the south. The Alutiiq Sugpiaq people have lived in the archipelago for more than 7,500 years. After the United States purchased Alaska in 1867, prospectors found placer-gold deposits on Raspberry Beach by 1915; mining remained limited, and the last recorded activity was in 1935.

Herring are small fish that travel in large schools. Most are not eaten directly but are “reduced” into oil and meal, used for animal feed and fertilizer, at herring-reduction plants. To press the oil and water out of the fish, workers first cooked them by conveying them through a long, steam-jacketed tube with a screw conveyor. The fish were then pressed in a perforated cylinder, draining liquid as they went. That liquid passed through a centrifuge, which separated the oil from the water, while the compressed residue, called press cake, was dried and ground into meal. The meal then flowed from a hopper into burlap sacks for shipping.

By 1951 Raspberry Island had three herring-reduction plants: Port Wakefield, Port Vita and Iron Creek. Iron Creek, the smallest, owned no fishing boats of its own and relied on independent vessels for its catch. Alaska’s herring-reduction industry, which had thrived through the 1920s and 1930s, went into rapid decline in the 1950s as cheaper Peruvian anchoveta oil undercut prices; the state’s last such plant closed in 1966. Today most of the island belongs to Afognak Native Corporation and is uninhabited except for two wilderness lodges built on former cannery sites at Port Wakefield and Iron Creek. Read more here and here. Explore more of Port Vita and Raspberry Strait here: