Telephone Hill was built around a Tlingit home
- Dorene Lorenz
- 7 hours ago
- 5 min read
By Dorene Lorenz
Recent commentary about Telephone Hill has focused on an 1881 Navy reservation and the reported placement of a Gatling gun overlooking Juneau and the Aak’w village for a couple years. That fact belongs to the historical record. It is not disputed.
What now requires correction is how that brief military presence has been expanded into a story about the residential neighborhood itself. The implication taking hold is that Telephone Hill should be understood primarily through a militarized lens, as though its homes demonstrate a racist act of removal of the Tlingit from the area. The documentation does not support that conclusion.
The story of Telephone Hill does not begin with a gun on a ridge. It begins with a home. Lot One of Telephone Hill was settled by a Tlingit family. Others chose to become their neighbors.
In March 1881, Richard “Dick” Harris — co-discoverer of gold at Silver Bow Basin with Joe Juneau — and his wife, Kate “Kitty” “Katie” Newcombe Harris, a Tlingit woman from Hoonah believed to be of the Wooshkeetaan clan, purchased Lots 1 and 2 on Telephone Hill from George Pilz. The fledgling neighborhood welcomed the newly married couple.
This was private property. It was not seized. It was occupied continuously. Residential improvements are visible in photographs by 1885. Tax records show ongoing development. A federal deed was secured in 1904. The property remained in the Harris family into the twentieth century. That matters, because the prevailing narrative now implies displacement where the record shows continuity.
The 1984 Telephone Hill Historic Site and Structures Survey draws a clear and deliberate distinction between two separate geographies. The northern summit is identified as a government reservation — later the site of the courthouse with its gallows, and, eventually, the State Office Building. This is where the Gatling gun would have resided.
The residential district is documented as lying south of Third Street, a platted townsite developed through private ownership. These were not interchangeable spaces. Geography matters.
Early waterfront photographs reinforce that distinction. They show Juneau concentrated along the docks, thinning as structures climb gradually into forested slopes. The government summit stands apart. The residential grid below is separate and legible. The town reads vertically: harbor, waterfront settlement, rising slope, wooded summit. An 1891 photograph by held at the Juneau-Douglas City Museum clearly shows Telephone Hill as a functioning residential neighborhood, densely built platted lots, private dwellings climbing the slope and a forested summit above.
There is no visual evidence of barracks, a cleared artillery platform in the residential band, or any sort of military compound footprint. The visual record confirms what the 1984 survey documents in writing: the military reservation and the residential neighborhood did not share the same footprint.
Overlapping years do not equal overlapping land. Yes, a Navy reservation existed in 1881. Yes, a Gatling gun is reported to have been positioned on the hill during that brief period. But a gun on a government reservation is not the same thing as a gun embedded in a platted residential neighborhood. Conflating the two is not interpretation — it is inference.
More importantly, that inference obscures a foundational truth: Telephone Hill was not a segregated enclave imposed on Native people. It was a mixed neighborhood that formed by choice.
Kitty Newcombe Harris lived on that hill. She was Tlingit. She raised her children there. William J. Harris Jr. would later become a nationally published political cartoonist and an early advocate for Alaska Native rights. The Harris family was not pushed out of the Telephone Hill neighborhood. They remained, with the citizens of Juneau making concessions to keep them in the home long after Dick Harris gave away all his wealth and was struggling to make ends meet.
And others chose to live beside them. Telephone Hill’s early residents included miners, lawyers, business owners and communications pioneers.
The Webster family operated Alaska’s first commercial telephone service from their hilltop home. Attorneys Edward Bayless and Louis Shackleford maintained a law library there. Families selected their lots knowing who already lived on the hill. This was chosen coexistence, not clearance.
To recast Telephone Hill as a symbol of anti-Native hostility is to erase the fact that a Tlingit family occupied Lot One — and stayed — and that the neighborhood grew around them. It replaces continuity with implication and choice with accusation.
History is complex. The 1880s were not free of tension. But complexity is not license for caricature. A brief military installation on a northern summit does not transform a privately-owned residential district into a monument to racism — especially when one of the first households on that hill was Native and remained so.
The documentary record does not support that leap. The visual record does not support that leap. The deed record does not support that leap.
Had a formal Section 106 review been undertaken, these distinctions — lot histories, boundary maps, periods of significance, and the separation between reservation and residential district — would have been documented and publicly vetted before assumption hardened into narrative.
That is precisely why Section 106 exists.
Affordable housing projects typically rely on layered federal and state financing. Removing federal eligibility disrupts the entire capital stack.
CBJ is correct that Section 106 is formally triggered only when there is federal funding, federal approval, or a federal undertaking. If redevelopment uses strictly local dollars, with no federal permits, no federal financing and no federal occupancy commitment, the federal review requirement does not attach. A cultural survey conducted locally is not the same thing as a federal Section 106 review, but absent federal involvement, the statute itself is not activated.
The issue is timing and foreseeability. If federal road funds, HUD housing programs, Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, federal loan insurance, or Coast Guard occupancy later become part of the project, federal compliance is triggered before irreversible ground disturbance. Demolishing first does not eliminate that obligation; it increases the risk of delay, mitigation requirements or financing complications. The legal trigger may not exist today, but if federal involvement is reasonably anticipated, the exposure is real.
And because most affordable or workforce housing developments rely on some form of federal participation - whether through Low-Income Housing Tax Credits administered by Alaska Housing Finance Corp., HUD programs such as HOME or FHA loan insurance, federal highway pass-through funds for roads, or energy and infrastructure grants — federal involvement is rarely theoretical. It is the norm in layered housing finance.
Federal agencies are not permitted to fund projects that have already eliminated the very historic resources they were required to evaluate. When demolition precedes review, agencies are placed in a legally vulnerable position. At minimum, funding can be delayed, conditioned on mitigation, or denied pending compliance.
If new primary-source maps emerge showing that specific residential lots lay within the military reservation footprint, that evidence should be examined. But absent such documentation, the 1984 survey and the uninterrupted deed history stand.
Telephone Hill’s story is layered: gold discovery, Native–settler marriage, civic leadership, communications innovation, evolving residential architecture. It is a story of coexistence as much as conflict. It does not begin with a weapon. It begins with a home.
We should tell the full history of Juneau, including its difficult chapters. But we should not invent displacement where the record shows continuity, or erase a Tlingit family in the name of correcting history.
• Dorene Lorenz is the chair of the Alaska Commission for Human Rights.
