Biography - Richard G. Willoughby

Richard G. Willoughby, Uncle Dick" Willoughby, as he was commonly known, was reported to have been born in North Carolina or Tennessee and to have first gone to California in 1849. A few years after that he was in Kansas and was married in Missouri in 1854, leaving at once with his bride for California. In 1857 he returned with his wife and a son, William, left them with her parents and again headed west. His wife died during the Civil War and Willoughby apparently never returned there or communicated with his son or other members of his family. In 1859 or 1860 he went to the Fraser River and from there to Cariboo, where he was reported to have "cleaned up" more than $100,000 in a few weeks and to have "blowed" it almost as rapidly. He moved o to the Omineca and the Cassiar and was in Wrangell in 1875, running a dance hall. From there he went to Sitka, prospecting in the summers and running a saloon in town during the winters. In the summer of 1880 Willoughby was prospecting in Glacier Bay, where an island is named for him, at the time Juneau and Harris made their strike in Silver Bow Basin. He reached the new camp in December, 1880. He mined around Gold Creek, engaged briefly in the hotel business and spent most of his time in the later years around Funter Bay. In Juneau he owned a cabin near the present corner of Main and Willoughby Avenue. Known as a practical joker and a free-wheeling story teller and entertainer, Willoughby was also said to have been a pretty fair fiddle player and to have been much in demand at miners' dances. In the 1890's he perpetrated a hoax known as the Silent City which gained nation-wide attention. Apparently he never talked of his early days and even his age was something of a mystery. When he made a will in 1900 his age was given as 65, but when he died at Monod Hospital in Seattle on May 13, 1902, it was reported as 75.

Willoughby Avenue - one of Juneau's principal north-south thoroughfares, runs from Main Street to Glacier Avenue. It was named for Richard G. Willoughby, one of the best known and most colorful of the early miners. Willoughby Avenue was constructed on piling in 1913 and 1914, following the line of hightide along the beach. Later it was filled with waste rock from the Alaska Juneau Mine.