Commercial fisherman Jim Szymanski became fascinated with salmon canning equipment when he began fishing in 1973.  “The engineering that went into these turn-of-the-century machines is just incredible.  I’d like to meet the men who designed them,” says Szymanski. 

That, combined with his concern at how Alaska’s salmon canning history was being forgotten, prompted him to create the Tsirku Canning Co., a working museum with a complete line of antique salmon canning equipment.

The project began in 1997 when Szymanski started searching for the equipment.  It took 2 years of untold phone calls to find it all.   The winter of 1998  found Szymanski  and  friends constructing the 40’ X 100’ metal building to house the museum. 

The 3 piece can reform line was located on Kodiak Island at Kodiak Salmon Packers.    Due to a bad business decision in 1935, and the creation of the new stamped can in 1982, this is the last  half-pound  can  reform line in existence. 

The rest  of  the  equipment  was  located  at an  old  cannery in Mountain Village at the mouth of the Yukon River.  The cannery had not been operating for 20 years.  The machines were rusted, broken down, and falling into the river.  The village corporation was happy to sell them.  Szymanski and a friend spent two weeks moving the equipment out of the ramshackle cannery buildings by hand.  The village had no heavy equipment to help move the machines, some of which weighed as much as 6 tons.  All of the work was down with come-alongs, pulleys, and skids.  They managed to pack  everything on pallets at the river’s edge just in time for the semi-annual barge going up the Yukon River to Fairbanks.  Luckily they were also able to locate a ship-wrecked barge with a container-load of antique can bodies. 

The equipment arrived in Haines the summer of 1999 and the massive project of renovation began.  Each piece had to be sandblasted to remove the rust, and broken parts had to be machined by hand. 

Silgan Corporation  (formerly American Can Co.) graciously donated the time of engineer Ron McBride for a week to help in the final stages of the projects.  McBride brought with him the original shop manuals for each machine and was able to answer numerous questions regarding the operation of each machine.

In June 2000 Tsirku Canning Co. opened to the public.