Glennallen library in the 1970s. It began in the early 1940s as an Alaska Road Commission office during cosntruction of the Glenn Highway

Glennallen began as World War II era construction camp for Glenn Highway

Glennallen , situated at the junction of the Glenn and Richardson Highways, started as a highway construction camp just prior to the 1941 entry of the United States into World War II. Relations between...

Messhall and Bunkhouse in Chitina among few remaining Copper River and Northwestern Railway buildings

    The CR&NW messhall and bunkhouse in Chitina in the 1980s The two buildings shown in the drawing are in Chitina. They were built as a messhall and bunkhouse for the Copper River...

Engine No. 52 in Skagway helped build the White Pass & Yukon Route Railway

  Engine No. 52 was the first locomotive on the White Pass and Yukon Route Railway. The drawing shows No. 52 as it looked in 2011, sitting on a siding in the Skagway train...

Ester studio evokes memory of painter, Rusty Heurlin

Rusty Heurlin’s studio in Ester in the early winter of 2017 The cabin in the drawing was the studio for Alaska painter, Magnus Colcord “Rusty” Heurlin. Matthew Reckard, the artist’s neighbor, recently showed me...

College Station and the Toonerville Trolley

  College Station in the mid-1920s. The four miles between the University of Alaska and downtown Fairbanks offers little impediment to modern travelers. However, when the university’s predecessor, the Alaska College of Agriculture and...

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...

Fairbanks looks back on anniversary of Masonic Temple loss

This is a reprint of Kris Capps column in this morning’s edition of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner newspaper.To see the column I wrote eight years ago about the Masonic Temple click here. Two years...

Navy gambled on Chickaloon coal and lost

  Chickaloon bunkhouse at Alpine Historical Park   Chickaloon is a small community located just off the Glenn Highway, about 75 miles northeast of Anchorage. Prior to Western contact the area was occupied by...

Interior Alaska’s once numerous fishwheels dwindle in number

Interior Alaska’s once numerous fishwheels dwindle in number

It may surprise people that the picturesque fishwheels that are so much a part of Interior Alaska life, and so often associated with Athabascan Indian culture, are not indigenous to Alaska or Canada. Athabascans...