Alaska Nellie was an Alaska legend
Nellie Neal Lawing was born in 1873 and grew up on a Missouri farm. According to her 1940 autobiography, “Alaska Nellie,” since childhood she had an adventuresome spirit, and her mother called her “half...
Category: Kenai Peninsula
Kenai Peninsula – Part of Southcentral Alaska – Peninsula south of Municipality of Anchorage
Railroads played important part in the development of Lake Kenai’s eastern shore
Kenai Lake, located 20 miles north of Resurrection Bay on the Kenai Peninsula, has hosted visitors since the early 1900s. During the Cook Inlet gold rush in the mid to late 1890s a winter-only...
Seward’s Ballaine House is reflection of flush days of Alaska Central Railway
John Ballaine was the entrepreneur primarily responsible for initiating construction of the Alaska Central Railway (ACR) across the Kenai Peninsula. He is also credited with founding the town on Seward, the southern terminus of...
Old Cooper Landing store and post office now tell area’s history as a museum
The hamlet of Cooper Landing, on the banks of the Kenai River just west of Kenai Lake, is one of the Kenai Peninsula’s recreation meccas. The community traces its history back to the 1896-97...
Seward’s Brown & Hawkins Store still standing after 117 years
Charles E. Brown and Thomas William “T.W.” Hawkins both came to Alaska in 1898. Brown entered the territory via the route pioneered by the Hudson’s Bay Company – the McKenzie, Rat and Porcupine rivers,...
Seward’s Jesse Lee Home fades to nothing with demolition of buildings
Seward’s Jesse Lee Home For Children passed into history at the end of 2020 when its remaining buildings were demolished. The first Jesse Lee Home, an orphanage and boarding school for Aleut children, opened...
Ninilchik Orthodox Church -7-12-2021
We just returned from a trip to the Kenai Peninsula. Here are a few pics of the Orthodox church at Ninilchik. For those of you unfamiliar with Ninilchik, the old village is nestled in...
Hope is only surviving gold camp from Upper Kenai Peninsula gold rush
Downtown Hope in 2014 According to the 1915 U.S.G.S. report, Geology and Mineral Resources of Kenai Peninsula, Alaska, the only recorded instances of Russian gold exploration in Alaska occurred between 1848 and 1851, when...
Van Gilder Hotel has been serving Seward for almost 100 years
Van Gilder Hotel in 2012 The community of Seward, at the northern end of Resurrection Bay, had an auspicious start in 1903 when developers with the Alaska Central Railway (ACR) landed at the site...
Kenai’s Orthodox Church serves local parish for over 120 years
The Church of the Holy Assumption is an Orthodox church in Kenai. In Alison Hoagland’s book, Buildings of Alaska, she describes it as a dramatic and well-proportioned building. Built in 1895, it is one...
