The history of the Alaska Commercial Company actually begins in 1776, when, under the flag of Czarist Russia, Gregor Shelikof and Ivan Golikof formed a trading company in the Alaskan territory that was under Russian rule. In 1799 they received trading privileges on the western coast of the United States and became the Russian-American Company. After the 1867 purchase of Alaska by the United States, the firm of Hutchison, Kohl & Company, including Hayward Hutchison, William Kohl, and Louis Sloss, bought the Russian-American Company. In 1868, Sloss, Lewis Gerstle, and A. Wassermann bought this company, although Hutchison, Kohl & Company was in simultaneous existence and under the same ownership until 1872, when the new company paid off the purchase. This new company, formed in 1868, was called the Alaska Commercial Company, and did business under this name until 1901. In that year, because of increasing competition in the sealskin trade, the Alaska Commercial Company merged with the International Mercantile Marine Company and Alaska Goldfields, Ltd., to form two new companies, the Northern Navigation Company and the Northern Commercial Company. The original owners of the Alaska Commercial Company, Louis Sloss, Gerstle, etc. carried on the business under the name of the Northern Commercial Company. Shortly afterwards, W.J. Erskine bought some of the old Alaska Commercial Company boats and set up a small successor to the Company in certain areas of Alaska.

Volney Richmond, since 1910 a Company supervisor, was one of several employees to purchase the Northern Commercial Company in 1922, thus leaving the functioning of the Company virtually unchanged, except in legal ownership. The Northern Commercial Company is still very much in existence today, with its executive offices in Seattle, Washington. Volney Richmond, Jr. carries on his father's position as president of the Company.

In the 1868 articles of incorporation, the stated purposes of the Alaska Commercial Company were "...to buy, sell, rent and lease real estate...to erect buildings...to buy, sell, exchange..merchandise, stocks, bonds, franchises...to build tramways and roads...to catch and pack fish...to manufacture..." The Company established stations in Alaska at Nome, Kodiak, Sunrise, Eagle City, Circle City, St. Michael, Unga, Unalaska and others, and in Dawson in Canada, as well as various other Canadian stations.

Although the Northern Commercial Company became the new name of the Alaska Commercial Company in 1901, business was still carried on in the name of the Alaska Commercial Company as well, according to the papers and records in this collection of material. Among the papers of the company, both the Alaska Commercial Company and the Northern Commercial Company are involved, and volumes for the Alaska Commercial Company, the Northern Commercial Company and the Northern Navigation Company are included in the collection. From evidence accumulated through correspondence regarding this collection, the Alaska Commercial Company apparently did not cease doing business in its own name until 1942, leaving the Northern Commercial Company as the sole successor to the A.C.Co.