Early Life
Born in Santa Cruz, CA as the 7th child of gold rush pioneer Titus Hale, the family moved to a farm on the lower Sacramento River in 1880. In 1885 Hale’s sister Rose married a Sacramento cannery man, Joseph Peter Haller, who was hired to build the first cannery on Bristol Bay’s Nushagak River earlier that year. Haller was then asked by William Bradford to build another cannery across the river and when he returned to Alaska in 1886, he brought along his 14-year old brother in law Crescent.
Crescent Hale, also known as Cress or Cres, returned to the Nushagak, near present day Dillingham, AK, in the summers that followed. At the Bradford cannery, he was schooled in the salmon canning trade. He was there in 1893 when all four Nushagak canneries merged with others to form the Alaska Packers Association (APA), a cannery cartel designed to control production and sell off surplus stockpiles of canned salmon.
At age 21, Cress was named superintendent of the Bradford cannery, later renamed the Diamond BB after the company name, the Bristol Bay Packing Co. Hale caught the eye of competitors and in 1899 the Pacific Steam Whaling Company hired 27-year old Cress to build a salmon cannery at Nushagak Point and serve as its first superintendent.
Read more about this topic: Crescent Porter Hale
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