Juneau, the capital of Alaska

Sitka, the first capital

Long before Juneau existed, Alaska was governed from Sitka. Under Russian rule the town was called New Archangel, and from 1808 it was the capital of Russian America and the headquarters of the fur trade. When the United States bought Alaska in 1867, the transfer ceremony took place in Sitka.

For the next seventeen years the new American possession had little civil government. When Congress finally gave it one, in the Organic Act of 1884, it made Sitka the temporary seat of government of the new District of Alaska. The governor, the court and the land office all worked from Sitka for more than twenty years.

Gold in the Gastineau Channel

Juneau owes its existence to gold. In 1880 the Auke chief Kowee guided two prospectors, Joe Juneau and Richard Harris, to gold at Gold Creek, on the mainland across from Douglas Island. A mining camp grew up almost overnight, and over the next decades the area became the center of Alaska’s hard-rock gold mining. By the 1890s it was one of the most prosperous communities in Alaska.

In 1900 Congress passed a law naming Juneau the seat of government. It came with a condition: the government would stay in Sitka until suitable grounds and buildings were ready in Juneau. That gave Sitka’s supporters room to delay.

The move by mail boat

The delay lasted six years. Governor John Brady, who had lived in Sitka for decades, resisted the move. After Brady resigned in 1906, the office of his successor, Governor Wilford Hoggatt, packed up the government. Its files, furniture and about 3,000 library books traveled to Juneau on the mail boat Georgia and were landed on September 8, 1906. When Congress made Alaska a territory in 1912, the Organic Act confirmed Juneau as the capital, and it stayed the capital at statehood in 1959.

The Capitol

The Alaska State Capitol does not look like most capitols. It has no dome, and it was not built as a capitol at all. It opened in 1931 as the Federal and Territorial Building, holding federal offices and the territorial government together. The design came from James A. Wetmore, the supervising architect of the US Treasury, and construction began in September 1929 and finished on February 2, 1931.

It is a five-story Neoclassical Revival building with brick-faced upper floors above a base of Indiana limestone. The marble used inside came from Alaska itself, quarried at Tokeen on Prince of Wales Island. Juneau residents helped make it happen: they bought the southern half of the city block and donated it to the federal government as the site.

Moving the capital

Juneau’s location has been argued over for half a century. Most Alaskans live in and around Anchorage and Fairbanks, hundreds of miles away, and no road leads to Juneau. In 1974 Alaska voters approved an initiative to move the capital to a new site on the road system. The move was never funded, and several later votes on moving the capital or the legislature failed. Juneau remains the capital, and the question still comes up from time to time.

Juneau and Alaska’s other cities

Juneau had about 31,600 residents in 2025, only slightly more than Fairbanks. Anchorage, the largest city by far, has about 287,000, roughly nine times as many.