Baranof Castle State Historic Site

Castle Hill is where Alaska changed hands — October 18, 1867, the Russian flag lowered and the American raised in front of the Governor's House, the transfer ceremony that ended Russian America. The hill was Tlingit first — Noow Tlein, the Kiksadi clan's fort that Baranov took in the six-day battle of 1804. The Russians made it the capital — the Russian-American Company seat from 1806, the Governor's House with the cupola built 1836.

The purchase was Seward's Folly — $7.2 million for a territory the papers mocked, the first American expansion into non-contiguous land. The castle burned in 1894; the hill is the state historic site now, the promontory where the archaeology shows a thousand years of Tlingit occupation under the Russian foundations. Alaska Day every October 18 reenacts the transfer on the same ground — the hill that was Tlingit, Russian, and American in turn.

The file keeps Baranof Castle: the Tlingit fort, the 1804 battle, the 1867 transfer, and the 1894 fire.

Baranof Castle is the archive's Alaska-transfer file — the hill where Russia became America.