Leephonse Hober Smith was born in Fairfax, Virginia in 1888. His father, John Smith installed pasteurization equipment in the Washington D.C. dairies. By February of 1907, 19-year old Lee Smith worked his way from San Francisco to Juneau aboard a lumber schooner. By 1911, after working for several Juneau gold mining companies, Smith and his partner James Bannigan, purchased property from Nicholas Wagner, which included the Chicken Ridge Dairy, several cows and a strip of land in the Evergreen Cemetery area. Although Smith and Bannigan dissolved their partnership after six months, William Altmiller joined Lee Smith in a partnership that would last almost nine years. In 1914, Altmiller's sister, Frances married Lee Smith and had six children: Lee Jr., Joe, Delores, Ted, Francis and Sid. In 1916, the Smiths homesteaded additional property on the Mendenhall flats area and continued to operate the downtown dairy until Lee Smith's death in 1949. Francis Smith died shortly before the family moved the dairy operation to the Mendenhall Valley in 1951. That same year, the town property was condemned in order to construct Harborview Elementary school. In 1965, the Alaska Dairy closed permanently and the valley property was zoned prime commercial land and the Smiths eventually sold some of their property to the Nugget Mall area developers (1970s). These photographs were copied from the albums of Francis Smith.