Category: Anchorage

Anchorage’s Holy Family Cathedral grew with the city

  Holy Family Cathedral in 2014 In early 1915, anticipating construction of the Alaska Railroad, hundreds of job seekers hastily erected a boomtown along Ship Creek in Upper Cook Inlet. Many in the camp...

Potter Section House near Anchorage offers glimpse into history of Alaska Railroad

  Potter Section House as it looked in winter 2018-2019 Potter Section House is at Mile 115.3, Seward Highway, near the mouth of Turnagain Arm and just south of Potter Marsh. Sitting adjacent to...

Newly constructed Palmer Highway linked Anchorage to Matanuska Valley in 1936

  Kink River Bridge as it looked in 2017. This views is from the south side of the bridge looking north towards Palmer. When a New Deal agricultural resettlement project was established in the...

Kulis Air National Guard Base served Alaska for over 50 years

  Kulis Air National Guard Base in the early 1960s, with a Fairchild C-123J parked in front. According to National Park Service documents, Alaska’s first Air National Guard unit, the 8144th Air Base Squadron,...

Anchorage’s Kimball Building is one of few remaining early commercial buildings

In 1914, the U.S. government was finalizing plans for a railroad connecting the Pacific coast of Southcentral Alaska with Fairbanks in Interior Alaska. President Woodrow Wilson had not yet determined whether the Alaska Northern...

Eklutna’s Orthodox church may be the oldest building in the Anchorage area

Old St. Nicholas church in Eklutna as it looked in the 1980s Eklutna, 25 miles northeast of Anchorage on the east shore of Upper Cook Inlet’s Knik Arm, is a small Dena’ina Athabascan community....

Alaska Pacific University a legacy of Methodist Church’s commitment to higher education

Grant Hall in about 2005. Except for the landscaping in front of the building, Grant Hall looks much the same as it did inthe early 1970s when my wife and I attended there.  ...

Anchorage’s Wendler Building was one of first commercial buildings completed in the new city

Larson & Wendler Grocery as it looked in 1916.   Anton (A.J.) Wendler owned a brewery at Valdez in 1915. However, with the temperance movement gaining traction in Alaska, A.J. decided to seek new...

Knik, Alaska: Little survives of early Cook Inlet commercial center

About 14 miles southwest of Wasilla on the western shore of Cook Inlet’s Knik Arm lies the hamlet of Knik. Its history may be most linked with the 1910 Iditarod Gold Rush and the...

Anchorages’s Fourth Avenue Theatre is opulent sister of Fairbanks’ Lacey Street Theatre.

  Anchorage’s Fourth Avenue Theatre as it looked in 1971 A few months ago, a funeral was held in Anchorage for the city’s Fourth Avenue Theater, Austin “Cap” Lathrop’s opulent re-imagining of what the...