Full details from the 1950 U.S. Census were released earlier this month, intriguing historians from around the country and providing a snapshot of the people who called the Chilkat Valley home more than seven decades ago.

While the federal government makes public population statistics and demographic data upon completion of each decennial census, the specifics — individual names, ages, gender, race, professions, incomes and more — must be kept secret for 72 years under federal law.

On April 1 those details from the 1950 census were published and are accessible for free on the National Archives’ website. They include millions of images of census forms that were filled out by hand with ink: population schedules, enumeration district maps and enumeration district descriptions. It was the first census in which the “Haines Recording District” was tallied separately from Skagway and Juneau.

Longtime Haines families can use the data to research their relatives, and curious residents can get a small glimpse of a transitional period in Haines history — after the highway was built, when the ferry system was in its infancy, but before the timber industry took off.

Even back then Haines’ workforce was seasonal. Most of the town’s jobs were in manufacturing, specifically the summer-only work of commercial fishing.

A 1953 report from the Alaska Development Board reads not much differently from the Haines Chamber of Commerce’s messaging today. The report said labor data from 1950 and 1951 “indicate the great need for new industries which can offer year round employment if the area is to develop any degree of economic stability.”

Pioneering businessman John Schnabel, whose hand played a major part in shaping Haines in the second half of the 20th century, is listed on the 1950 census as 30 years old, never married, having completed one year of college, having served in the U.S. military during World War II and self-employed at a lumber mill. The census also notes that Schnabel “is a lodger at Hotel Halsingland.”

Daughter Debra Schnabel, who was born a couple years after the 1950 census was taken, said Halsingland was “the only boarding house in town: a place (John) could live as a single man with no money.” Schnabel would go on to become one of the valley’s largest private landowners and employers.

The issue of land ownership and rights was of much concern in the mid-century, especially among local Tlingit families.

The state’s first anti-discrimination bill, which made it illegal to discriminate based on race, was passed in 1945, with leadership from Elizabeth Peratrovich, 10 years after the U.S. Congress first recognized Tlingit and Haida people as a single tribe. But the land claims process spanned decades.

“With everybody wanting to come to Alaska, we are afraid that we are going to lose everything and earnestly request the Government to give us protection and set aside for us the lands which are ours by aboriginal rights,” Chilkoot Indian Association representatives wrote in a 1946 letter. “Within the last year white people are coming to our area and settling. We are afraid they will bring their friends and then their friends will bring more friends and before long there will be nothing left for us.”

The federal Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) wasn’t passed until 1971, although Haines and four other Southeast communities weren’t included in that legislation. The land claims movement continues today with Alaska Natives Without Land, an organization with local representatives that has been pushing U.S. Congress for decades to amend ANCSA to include Haines and the other “landless” communities.

Tresham Gregg, artist and former Haines assembly member, is listed on the census as “Teddy,” age 6. His father, listed as Tresham, who went by “Ted,” had moved to town just a few years before the census was taken, after purchasing Fort Seward with several other families.

​​“Life was idyllic,” Gregg said. “Woods were just right out the backyard across the street. You could just slip into the woods and be gone and just have a great time imagining your fantasy realm.”

Gregg recalled that the area of downtown along Second Avenue, where First National Bank now is located, was a field in 1950, and nearby where the church now stands was the Haines House boarding facility and Presbyterian mission. Three years before the 1950 census, the government school educating Haines House children closed, and the students entered the city’s school. Haines House also changed its policy that year and began housing non-Native children. It closed in 1960.

Although, as Gregg said, Haines was “pretty damn small” in 1950, the subsequent decade saw change.

In 1951, the Territory of Alaska bought the “Chilkoot” ferry from Haines resident Steve Homer, marking the de facto start to the Alaska Marine Highway System, which wasn’t formally established until 1963.

In 1953, the same year that Haines’ streets were first paved, the U.S. Army built the Lutak Dock and the fuel tank farm, as well as the fuel pipeline to Fairbanks, which was decommissioned in the 1970s.

Chilkat Valley historian Dan Henry said the 1950s in the valley were marked by discussions around the Klukwan Lode, an iron deposit spanning the earth from Iron Mountain near Klukwan down to the Chilkat River — “the most pure deposit of iron possibly in North America,” Henry said.

Following surveys conducted in the 1950s, the Columbia Mining Company at the end of the decade announced plans to mine the deposit, then pulled out, and Klukwan Iron Ore Co. entered into a partnership with U.S. Steel, Henry said. An estimated 900 people would have been employed at the time, and an iron mill would have been built in Haines. But the mega project never came to fruition.

“I would say that’s probably the biggest news of that time. But in the ‘50s they knew there was a huge deposit there, and lots of people were coming up to survey it,” Henry said.

The census was taken nine years before Alaska became a state. Henry said that at the time, the Territory of Alaska paid a bounty of $2.50 for a pair of eagle talons. There was a barrel in town, by the dock, where residents would dump talons after retrieving their bounties.

“When the barrel filled up, people would come out and spread the talons all out on the beach by the dock. Everybody from town would watch live eagles preying on the talons. That was kind of a big event, when the talons got dumped out on the beach. You could just imagine tens or maybe 100 or more eagles that would show up and fight over the talons,” Henry said. “It was a way for people to earn money. Two dollars and fifty cents for a pair of talons was no chump change at that point.”

The practice ended in 1953, after an estimated 128,000 eagles had been killed (since 1917). Six years later Alaska became a state, affording eagles protection under the National Bald Eagle Act of 1940. Statehood also moved much land in the Chilkat Valley out of private and tribal hands and into the new state’s possession.

You wouldn’t glean some of these historical tidbits from poring over the 1950 census data, but you would see familiar names — Hotch, Strong, Ward, Brouillette, Heinmiller, Jurgeleit, Clayton — and you would learn a thing or two about the individuals who lived here.

Nationwide, the 1950 census was the last one conducted fully house-to-house. The nation’s population was exploding. As part of the post-World War II baby boom, more children were born across the U.S. in 1950 than in 2020, when the country’s population was twice as big.

The Territory of Alaska’s population increased by 75% between 1940 and 1950, when it reached 126,661. But the expansion hadn’t quite hit Haines yet. The town’s population slightly decreased over the decade, by 21 people, and the district’s population decreased by 6%.

According to the 1950 census, there were about 34,000 Alaska Native people in the state at the time and 91,000 white people. (The census recorded the race of each individual it recorded, but it didn’t publish aggregate numbers by race specifically in Haines, although those numbers now could be distilled by a scrupulous counter.)

Beyond Haines, the release of census data specifics sparked news reports and excitement among historians.

“This is the Super Bowl and the Olympics combined, and it’s only every 10 years — it’s awesome stuff,” Matt Menashes, the executive director of the National Genealogical Society, told the New York Times a few weeks ago. “What’s so great about these points of data is that it helps you paint a picture — not just relationships, but what society was like.”

The 1950 census forms can be viewed at https://1950census.archives.gov/.

*This article has been updated from its original version in print.