Category: Seward

Seward – historic settlement, city on Resurrection Bay on the Kenai Peninsula, southern terminus of Alaska Railroad.

The Seward depot as it looked during winter in the early 1920s, when it was still located near the foot of Adams Street.

Old depot is a monument to Seward’s survival as a railroad town

The old railroad depot in Seward is testament to the travails the city has gone through as a railroad town. Although constructed in 1917, the depot’s history can be traced back to the advent...

This is the cabin that Nellie and Billie Lawing disassembled and floated to their Roadhouse location at Kenai Lake. Once reassembled they used it as a cafe. It and three other Lawing buildings were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.

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...

The 116-year-old Ballaine House in Seward home to Frank Ballaine, brother of the founder of Seward, John Ballaine. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

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...

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,...

Talkeetna and the Alaska Commercial Company’s freighting gamble

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...

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...