Digital Bob Archive

Dr. Hugh S. Wyman may have been the first resident physician on Gastineau Channel. The matter is uncertain because Juneau did not have a newspaper until 1887 and earlier records are sketchy. Dr. Wyman came to Alaska in 1883 as Surgeon for the U.S.S. Adams, stationed at Sitka. Late in 1884 or early in 1885 John Treadwell hired him as physician for his Alaska Mill & Mining Company and the doctor moved to Treadwell. He also became the attending physician at St. Ann's Hospital in Juneau.

In the fall of 1885 Dr. Wyman returned briefly to Sitka where on November 18 he married Miss Henrietta Cohen, daughter of the Sitka brewer, Abraham Cohen, who had also established a brewery in Juneau on a site now occupied by a part of the Senate building. The Wyman daughter, Prudence Estelle, was born August 19, 1886, and was said to have been the first white child born on Douglas Island.

Soon after that event the Wymans moved to Juneau. The doctor had already staked a city lot in Block 19, where the Capitol is now, and he purchased a lot at Third and Seward and built a large dwelling on it. He opened his first office in Juneau in the Stanford Building, where the Log Cabin is today. Later he moved to Main Street, just above Second, where he advertised: \"Surgical clinic, Sanatorium; Vapor, Hot Air, Sulphur and Electric Baths.\"

In 1892 Dr. Wyman sold his home to B.M. Behrends who remodeled it for a store and moved into it from across Seward Street where he had opened for business in October, 1891. Just where the Wymans moved has not been determined.

Like nearly everyone else in Juneau at that time, the doctor became interested in mining and he purchased the Dora lode claim on Gold Creek, just east of what is now known as Ebner Falls. Like many of the lode claims in the valley, the Dora had a thick layer of weathered, decomposed quartz, with fairly high gold content, on its surface. Dr. Wyman had an arastra built near the bank of Gold Creek and across the creek from the Webster stamp mill. An arastra is a rather primitive apparatus for grinding ore and they worked well on soft quartz. Dr. Wyman's arastra was said to be capable of reducing a ton to a ton and a half of ore a day. The ore was carried from the mine on the mountainside above the creek to the arastra by a rope tramway. By 1892 the soft ore had all been milled, the arastra was ineffective on the harder ore underneath, and Dr. Wyman sent some ore to other mills. In 1893 he sold the property to William Ebner who incorporated it in his Ebner Mine.

The Wyman family left Juneau in August, 1899, and settled in Olympia, Washington, where he continued a medical practice until shortly before his death on September 12, 1913.