Your typical vision of milk deliveries rarely includes loading milk containers into a boat to ferry down a glacial river and then through a saltwater channel before reaching the customers of a wilderness community. But in frontier Juneau, nothing was typical.

Because fresh milk was such a precious commodity, dairies were springing up around the area as early as the 1880s. Many were started by those who came to Juneau to work in the newly established gold mines. Leephonse Hober Smith landed in the dairy business by accident. Smith was caretaking the Chicken Ridge Dairy while the owner was out of town when he received a cryptic telegram stating: "You can have the damned place." Smith and a partner purchased the dairy for $10.

Many dairy families moved to Juneau from Austria, Norway, Germany, and other distant lands. Each farmer brought new methods to the process of collecting and distributing milk. The method of milking evolved from hand milking to machines, while storage methods progressed from setting containers in icy mountain streams to cooling tanks that constantly stirred the vats of milk.

The Juneau dairy boom lasted until the mid-1960s when "down south" prices and improved transportation methods made the local dairies uncompetitive.