Crime Scene & Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Wrangell Wrangell, AK

Wrangell is a unified municipality, the City and Borough of Wrangell, in Southeast Alaska, on the northern tip of Wrangell Island in the Alaska Panhandle, 155 miles south of Juneau and across the narrow Zimovia Strait from the mouth of the Stikine River.

It was incorporated as a city in 1903 and reincorporated as a unified home rule borough on May 30, 2008, after 63.99 percent of voters approved borough status.

The borough had a population of 2,127 at the 2020 census, down from 2,369 in 2010, with 933 households and 1,273 housing units.

The median age was 48.5 years, with 19.7 percent of residents under the age of 18 and 22.7 percent aged 65 or older.

Its Tlingit name is Ḵaachx̱ana.áakʼw, and the Tlingit people of the area, the Shtaxʼhéen Ḵwáan, lived there centuries before Europeans arrived.

Wrangell was founded by Russians in 1834 as the stockade Redoubt Saint Dionysius, ordered by Baron Ferdinand von Wrangel, for whom the town and island are named; the Hudson's Bay Company leased it in 1839 as Fort Stikine, and the United States built Fort Wrangell there in 1868.

Having been Tlingit territory and then under Russian, British, and American rule, Wrangell is the only Alaskan city to have been governed under four flags.

The Stikine River was a Tlingit trade route to the interior, and thousands of miners traveled up it to the Cassiar and Klondike gold rushes.

The first Presbyterian church in Alaska was founded in Wrangell in 1877, and St. Rose of Lima, established May 4, 1879, is the oldest Catholic church in Alaska.

Naturalist John Muir lived in Wrangell in 1879-1880 with the Reverend S. Hall Young, who founded the Fort Wrangell Tlingit Industrial School, the nucleus of the later Wrangell Institute boarding school.