Crescent Porter Hale

Crescent Porter Hale (1872–1937) was an American industrialist who was involved in the canned salmon industry in Bristol Bay, Alaska throughout his adult 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.

Then in 1900, Joseph Haller formed the North Alaska Salmon Company and returned to Bristol Bay with two of his brothers-in-law. Cress Hale was named general superintendent of Haller’s company and Hale’s brother William as bookkeeper.

Cress built two new canneries: one on the Kvichak River at a place named Hallerville and the other on the Egegik River across from the APA’s Diamond E. Two years later, he expanded North Alaska’s holdings again, building the Lockenok Cannery at the confluence of the Kvichak and Alagnak Rivers and then returned to the Nushagak to establish a cannery at Ekuk.

The North Alaska Salmon Co. emerged as the biggest competitor to the APA and in 1903 briefly took the lead in a technological race to mechanize the salmon canning process. Canning operations were mostly mechanized by the turn of the 20th century, except for cleaning the fish itself which was mostly done by Chinese workers. Haller and Hale formed the Canners Machine Co. and allied with the Letson Burpee Co. of Seattle and ran its fish cleaning machines at all of its canneries. Hale was awarded patent 798,334 for his improvements to the machine in 1905, but eventually the design of Edmund Augustine Smith, better known as the “Iron Chink,” became the industry standard.

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