Cannery Cove lies on the southeastern shore near the head of North Arm Moira Sound, about 28 miles (45 km) east-southeast of Hydaburg and 25 miles (40 km) southwest of Ketchikan, Alaska. North Arm Moira Sound is a fjord extending 4 miles (6.5 km) northwest from Moira Sound on the southeastern coast of Prince of Wales Island. Most of the area is underlain by rocks assigned to the accretionary Alexander Terrane. North Arm is bisected by the Keete Inlet Fault that separates sedimentary rocks of the Ordovician Descon Formation on the southern shore from the metasedimentary and metavolcanic rocks of the pre-Ordovician Wales Group on the northern shore. Like the island’s other inlets, North Arm was carved by Pleistocene glaciers. Captain George Vancouver named Moira Sound in August 1793 for the Earl of Moira. At that moment the title belonged to Francis Rawdon-Hastings, who had become the 2nd Earl of Moira weeks earlier on his father’s death and was later created Marquess of Hastings. Edmund F. Dickins, commander of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey steamer Thomas R. Gedney, reported the local name for Cannery Cove in 1905.

In 1912 the Starr brothers of Portland, Oregon, formed the Starr-Collinson Packing Company, which built a cannery in North Arm Moira Sound on a beach at a creek mouth long used by Tlingit and Haida people to land canoes. Tlingit peoples have occupied the Alexander Archipelago for thousands of years; Haida migrants arrived from Haida Gwaii in the early 18th century and settled southern Prince of Wales Island, territory that became known as Kaigani Haida country and today includes the village of Hydaburg. World War I created global demand for canned food, and Alaska’s cannery count grew quickly from 1917, when nine new plants opened in southeastern Alaska, among them the Lane & Williams cannery in Moira Sound. By 1926 four floating canneries also operated in the sound. The Starr-Collinson cannery burned in 1929; Lane & Williams closed in 1919.

In 1915 prospectors developed a small gold prospect, the Cymru Mine, at Mineral Lake on the north shore near the head of North Arm Moira Sound. The workings comprised an inclined shaft with horizontal drifts at 30 feet (9 m) and 90 feet (27 m); the lower drift ran southeast along the ore vein for 96 feet (29 m), while the upper drift was more extensive. The mine had several buildings and a substantial wharf linked to the workings by an aerial tramway; ore was hoisted through the shaft and moved downhill to bunkers at tidewater. Today Cannery Cove and North Arm Moira Sound lie within the Tongass National Forest and the Ketchikan Mining District. No cannery, mine or permanent settlement remains active; the U.S. Forest Service maintains public recreation cabins nearby, including one at Kegan Cove on Moira Sound, serving boaters, anglers and hunters visiting the now-uninhabited shoreline. Read more here and here. Explore more of Cannery Cove and North Arm Moira Sound here: