Category: 49 History

Wed, December 18, 2013

Alaska Canneries Resource Guide from the Anchorage Museum

By Sara Piasecki Earlier this year, when the Alaska Association for Historic Preservation announced the state’s Ten Most Endangered Historic Properties for 2013, they included “Historic Canneries (Statewide)” as location number 10. Responding to this call, the Bob and Evangeline Atwood Alaska Resource Center of the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center tasked its summer interns with creating a guide to historic photographs of Alaskan canneries held in the Museum’s archives. The resulting 16-page document has already been updated three times since... (Read More)

Mon, December 09, 2013

Pipeline Games

Over the past several weeks we’ve shared with you images of Alaska- and Arctic-themed board games. Today, in the final installment of the series…The PIPELINE!Here’s “Alaska Pipeline: The Energy Crisis Game,” produced by an Anchorage company called Pipeline Games, Ltd., in 1973:Each of the game’s four characters—the roughneck, the professor, the tycoon, and the bespectacled woman—teach important facts about the pipeline, all designed to engender support for the project that was then still in its pre-construction planning phase.Here’s the “Alaska... (Read More)

Wed, December 04, 2013

“Someday…ask the boys from the Aleutians”

by Jeff Dickrell As an avid eBay troller, I have developed a skill for scanning the multitude of item titles, looking for anything out of the ordinary (https://seakayaker.org/estate-sale-ebay-wanderings-piece-aleut-history/). I am looking for, mainly, old maps, prints, images and anything to do with Unangan iqyak (kayaks). I have been pretty successful, picking up the odd print, the old postcard, lots of stuff where I am the only bidder, because I seem to be the only one interested. Who needs a 1909... (Read More)

Tue, December 03, 2013

Alaska’s First Cannery, Klawock

By: Pat RoppelGeorge Hamilton built a salmon saltery at what became Klawock sometime around 1869. Sometime in late 1876, Hamilton disposed of his trading and fishing post to the San Francisco firm of Sisson, Wallace and Co. As a result, the first salmon cannery to operate in Alaska was built.In December 1877, businessmen incorporated, under the laws of California, the North Pacific Packing and Trading Company. The incorporators were W. C. Lynde, A. W. Sisson, Clark W. Crocker, W. H.... (Read More)

Tue, November 12, 2013

Gaming for Arctic Adventure!

In our ongoing series “Alaska Board Games,” this week we bring you adventures in northern travel.First up, “Round the World Fliers” (circa 1925):Unlike every other board game that depicts Alaska in the conventional Mercator fashion, this game takes a circumpolar view that situates Alaska as part of a global aerial route. Only with the advent of air travel at the time of the game’s production was such a view conceptualized in the popular imagination. Here’s a close-up of the Alaska... (Read More)