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In this old Cheechako News photo, officials consider an early display map of the Kenai Peninsula Borough, 1969.

Life

No Simple Matter: Finding the borough a home — Part 5

Time and money are always tricky ingredients in government projects.

Dolly Farnsworth was another driving force in the early days of the borough. She housed the borough’s first administrative efforts in her own bookkeeping building — initially for free — and assisted borough clerk Frances Brymer with early efforts in taxes, assessing and accounting. (Clark Fair photo)

Life

No Simple Matter: Finding the borough a home — Part 4

The entire borough operating budget for the first six months was about $13,000.

Loren, editor and publisher of the Cheechako News, sold a lot of ad space during the back-and-forth publicity campaigns by communities striving to become the administrative seat for the Kenai Peninsula Borough. When the campaigns were over, he offered unifying words for the future. (Photo courtesy of the KPC historical archive)

Life

No Simple Matter: Finding the borough a home — Part 3

It didn’t take long for the sparks to fly.

Harold Pomeroy was the director of Alaska’s Territorial Civil Defense before becoming the first executive of the Kenai Peninsula Borough in 1964. (Photo courtesy of Alaska Digital Archives)

Life

No Simple Matter: Finding the borough a home — Part 2

The decision to locate the borough seat in or near Tustumena was termed by the Cheechako as “perhaps…

This 1955 aerial shows a portion of Joe and Mickey Faa’s homestead, including the Quonset hut that was on the property before it was acquired by Howard and Maxine Lee in 1948. The fields and other cleared land now house much of Soldotna’s growing medical establishment. (Photo courtesy of Al Hershberger)

Life

No Simple Matter: Finding the borough a home — Part 1

Binkley Street was just a gravel-covered Soldotna back road in November 1969.

Having a ready team of work dogs made longer trips out of Seward more manageable for Steve Melchior. The woman accompanying him on the wagon is unidentified. (Photo courtesy of the Melchior Family Collection)

Life

Steve Melchior: Treasured peninsula pioneer with a sketchy past — Part 7

Stephan “Steve” Melchior parleyed a partially fabricated past into a respected life as a miner and a builder…

Steve Melchior in his Seward yard with two of his many dogs, probably circa mid-1920s. (Photo courtesy of the Melchior Family Collection)

Life

Steve Melchior: Treasured peninsula pioneer with a sketchy past — Part 6

This moose-and-man journey attracted considerable attention nationwide.

In September 1946, the Alaska Sportsman Magazine published “Moose Ranch,” an article by Mamie “Niska” Elwell. The story describes Steve Melchior’s moose-ranching operation from the 1920s and features two photographs of Melchior.

Life

Steve Melchior: Treasured peninsula pioneer with a sketchy past — Part 5

In June 1913, a peninsula game warden informed the governor that Melchior was raising a moose calf on…

Posing in front of Steve Melchior’s cabin on the Killey River in 1912 are (left) packer/cook Ferdinand “Fritz” Posth and hunting guide William “Wild Bill” Dewitt, with two trophy Dall sheep heads. (Photo from E. Marshall Scull’s 1914 hunting memoir, “Hunting in the Arctic and Alaska”)

Life

Steve Melchior: Treasured peninsula pioneer with a sketchy past — Part 4

Steve Melchior seemed to disappear, perhaps on purpose.

Capt. Karl Kircheiß, a decorated German sailor, visited Steve Melchior in Seward in 1932.

Life

Steve Melchior: Treasured peninsula pioneer with a sketchy past — Part 3

Stephan “Steve” Melchior sent a friend to Katherine to tell her that he had died in Alaska.

This is the most famous photograph of Steve Melchior, as a copy of it resides in the Anchorage Museum of History and Art. The Melchior family owns a very similar photograph, with a note in pencil from Steve Melchior on the back. The note, written for family members back in Germany in the late 1920s when Melchior was suffering from rheumatism, says, “That is the only way I can get out because my legs won’t walk anymore. I don’t like driving a car, and the dogs take me wherever I want to go. The one in the front is called Bill (in German, Wilhelm), and the one on the left is called Waldman. The black one on the right is called Nick or Nikolaus. Three good, loyal workers, my bodyguard.”

Life

Steve Melchior: Treasured peninsula pioneer with a sketchy past — Part 2

By at least his early 20s, Steve Melchior had begun to fabricate a past.

Photo courtesy of the Melchior Family Collection Between 1879 and 1892, Stephan Melchior (far left, middle row) performed his mandatory Prussian military service. He was a member of the Eighth Rhineland Infantry Regiment No. 70 in Trier, Germany.

Life

Steve Melchior: Treasured peninsula pioneer with a sketchy past — Part 1

Did anyone in Alaska know the real Steve Melchior? That is difficult to say.

Frank Rowley and his youngest child, Raymond, stand in knee-deep snow in front of the protective fence around the main substation for Mountain View Light & Power in Anchorage in 1948 or ’49. This photo was taken a year or two before Rowley moved to Kenai to begin supplying electrical power to the central peninsula. (Photo courtesy of the Rowley Family)

Life

Let there be light: The electrifying Frank Rowley — Part 2

In July 1946, the soft-spoken Rowley was involved in an incident that for several consecutive days made the…

This is the Kenai Power complex. The long side of the plant faces the Frank Rowley home, seen here at the right side of the photograph. (Photo courtesy of the Rowley Family)

Life

Let there be light: The electrifying Frank Rowley — Part 1

Frank Rowley made one of the most important steps toward modernization in the history of Kenai.

Mary L. Penney and her son Ronald, circa 1930, probably in New York prior to her move to Florida, where she lived out the final years of her life. (Photo courtesy of the Penney Family Collection)

Life

Mary Penney and her 1898 Alaska adventure — Part 10

Stories of their adventures persisted, and the expedition’s after-effects lingered.

Herman Stelter, seen here in front of his home in the Kenai River canyon, was another of the Kings County Mining Company members to stay in Alaska. (U.S. Forest Service photo, circa 1910s)

Life

Mary Penney and her 1898 Alaska Adventure — Part 9

Brooklynite Mary L. Penney seemed to know that she was not ready to settle into middle age and…

At some point after William B. Hurd was buried in Kenai in 1899, his family asked that his body be exhumed and sent back to New York, where it was reburied. This image, from findagrave.com, shows the marker on his final resting place.

Life

Mary Penney and her 1898 Alaska adventure — Part 8

Despite Mary’s dreams and the newspaper’s low-brow assessment of her experience, the culmination of her journey was decidedly…

This excerpt from a 1916 U.S. Department of Agriculture map shows Kachemak Bay and vicinity less than 20 years after the arrival of the Kings County Mining Company.

Life

Mary Penney and her 1898 Alaska adventure — Part 7

The Kings County Mining Company had hiked through the mountain benchlands at the advent of winter, hoping to…

U.S. Army Captain Edwin F. Glenn led an 1898 military exploration of Cook Inlet. Glenn and his crew, who were departing the inlet at about the same time that the Kings County Mining Company was arriving, left behind a journal of the expedition. That journal, archived in the Alaska Digital Archives, included daily notations about the weather.

Life

Mary Penney and her 1898 Alaska adventure — Part 6

They cruised around a bit and then returned to Homer on Oct. 10 after “a most tranquil and…

Dr. Thomas F. Sweeney was a dentist seeking adventure and riches. He also had some mistaken ideas about the difficulties that life in remote Alaska entailed. (Public photo from ancestry.com)

Life

Mary Penney and her 1898 Alaska Adventure — Part 5

The three-masted ship called the Agate was a reliable 30-year ocean veteran when it entered Cook Inlet in…