Art show at Wasilla Museum

Art show at Wasilla Museum in September – “Ramblings through Mat-Su history”

  Featuring drawings and descriptions of historic sites around the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. The show will be at the Wasilla Museum and Visitor Center from September 9th through October 7th. Open reception on Friday, September...

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...

Most likely, the old storage structure at Lawing on the eastern shore of Kenai Lake was originally a railroad work crew housing unit, capable of being transported on a flat car.

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...

The Merrill Field control tower as it looked in the 1970s. This tower was replaced in 1999. Its “cab” is now located at the Alaska Aviation Museum at Lake Hood, and is open to the public

Merrill Field serves Anchorage aviators for over 90 years

In 1915 the southern edge of Anchorage was Ninth Avenue – with only undeveloped land beyond. In about 1917, vegetation was trimmed back along a one-block wide by 16-block long strip of land south...

The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner building as it looks today. The News-Miner is the oldest continually-operating paper in Alaska, beginning operations in 1903

The long history of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

The 1980 book “Adventures in Alaska Journalism since 1903” relates that itinerant newspaper man, George M. Hill, freighted a small press from Dawson to Fairbanks in 1903. Once in Fairbanks he established the Weekly...

Treadwell saltwater pump house as it looked in 2012. A new rood was put on the building in 2013 and the building was secured.

Treadwell Mine Complex was once the largest low-grade gold mine in the world

Treadwell was a company mining town just south of Douglas on Douglas Island. Associated with the town was the Treadwell Complex — four interlinked mines strung out along the island’s shore. During its lifetime,...

1935 Chevrolet “Auto-Railer” self-propelled rail bus used on railrway line between Chitina and McCarthy

Chitina Auto-Railer and the end of the line for Copper River and Northwestern Railway

Mines in the Wrangell Mountains, 65 miles east of Chitina and only a few miles south of McCarthy, were world-class copper producers during the early 1900s. However, by the 1930s the copper reserves were...

Tomorrow is last chance to see my Ramblings through Historic Sites art show

Tomorrow, 5 pm till 8 pm, is your last chance to see my art show at the Grange Gallery in North Pole. The show contains 30 new pen & ink drawings of historic buildings,...

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...

Old Presbyterian chapel at Delta Junction, built in 1952. It was one of three chapels built to support the Rev. Bert Bingle's Alaska Highway ministry

The Rev. Bert Bingle’s 600 mile-long Alaska Highway parish

Bert Bingle was a Presbyterian minister who came to Cordova in 1928 to serve the people along the Copper River and Northwestern Railroad, and then moved to Palmer in 1935 to start a church...