Thursday, May 23, 2013

"Small Town, Big Blast"


SMALL TOWN, BIG BLAST

August 2008

The first blast shattered one wall of the propane company’s garage and office building and set the rest ablaze. Quickly, the adjacent home of company manager Paul Frickey was also in flames.

The second blast, which destroyed a tanker truck containing a thousand gallons of liquefied petroleum gas, blew Soldotna Fire Chief Harold Jackson off his feet nearly 30 yards away, and rocked the entire city of Soldotna with its concussive force.

Caught in a low-lying area between their nearby homes, Verona Wilson and Vera Howarth were caught by the ignition of the heavier-than-air gas and were burned about the legs, hands and face.

Students at Soldotna Elementary School, more than half a mile distant, had just been excused for the day by the 3:30 bell and were spilling out onto the playground when they heard the blast and saw the giant plume of black smoke fill the afternoon sky behind the leafless trees on the horizon.

It was Nov. 25, 1968, and less than a quarter-mile northeast along the Sterling Highway, Al Hershberger was at his television and electronics shop when everything blew.

“I was standing by the door,” Hershberger said. “My back was turned when it actually blew. And I immediately turned around and saw everything blowing up down there…. I saw the hood of what turned out to be a pickup flying across the road. And I saw big pieces of wood. Those turned out to be the garage door when I went over and looked at it. I saw those flying clear across the road.”

The heat from the conflagration was so intense that it melted power lines and knocked out electricity from Kasilof north to the outskirts of Kenai, and east all the way to Sterling.

Windows were blown out of nearby buildings, two 700-gallon tanks of propane were destroyed, and in the aftermath of the main explosions nearly 20 80-gallon tanks occasionally detonated like small bombs.

Volunteer firefighters, first from Soldotna and then from Kenai, began rushing to the scene within 10 minutes and were able to save Wilson’s Soldotna Store with jets of water from high-pressure hoses.

The problem had begun that afternoon when a local delivery driver for the Petrolane business—located ironically on what are now the grounds of the Soldotna Fire Department—pulled in with his small truck and connected his tank to the fuel line of the big tanker. After he had filled his own tank with propane, according to Hershberger, he “forgot to unhook the hose and drove away and tore the valve off the truck.”

“And all that propane leaked out (of the big tank), and it was laying on the ground,” he said.

Hershberger said he believes that the driver immediately knew what he had done because he turned around and came back to warn people in the area. Don Wilson (Verona’s husband) and others hurried to shut off pilot lights—anything that might create ignition—and everyone attempted to move away from the greatest concentration of the invisible fuel.

No one, Hershberger said, is really sure what triggered the initial explosion, but the fire from the first blast certainly set off the second, and then the sky filled with flames and smoke.

Remarkably, no one died in all the fiery chaos that followed, and Wilson and Howarth’s burns were the only injuries.

Perhaps even more remarkably, quick and risky work by the emergency-response teams prevented the scene from becoming much, much worse.

After volunteer firefighters had sprayed a second large tanker, Kenai Fire Chief Frank Wisecarver crawled beneath it and closed open valves to cut off the flow of fuel. Nearby were five additional 1,000-gallon tanks and an even larger tank containing 8,000 gallons.

It took several hours to quell the flames and begin to assess all the damage, and emergency teams labored well into the early winter evening. In the end, Wilson and Howarth spent time in a hospital, Howarth for the longer period since her burns were more severe.

The Frickey home was obliterated, and Marion Frickey visited the scene the next day, searching for any valuables that might have escaped the fire. Hershberger remembered that she “found a handful of melted coins,” and very little else.

Two days later, on Nov. 27, the local twice-weekly newspaper, The Cheechako News, featured a banner headline in type two inches high that proclaimed, “BLAST RAZES GAS FACILITY.” Photographs in that issue and the one of Nov. 29 showed buildings in flames, the silhouettes of firefighters at work, vehicles on fire, and plenty of smoldering remnants.

Early December issues featured advertisements for benefit dinners and activities to help the homeless Frickeys. And months later, a trial was avoided when Howarth and Wilson settled out of court with the Petrolane Alaska Gas Services Company.

 

"Man of the Mountains"




Harry A. Johnson (far right) with a party of hunters, 1904. (Photos courtesy of historian Gary Titus)

MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS

January 2009

By the time Harry A. Johnson heard the handcar moving toward him down the rails, he had walked 15 of the 20 miles to Seward from his mining camp on Victory Creek. Earlier in the day, he had been attacked by a brown bear, and now, using a shovel for a cane, he was working his way toward town to get some stitches for the nine bite wounds on his arms, legs and back.

Manually propelling the handcar were Johnson’s friends, Fred Beyer and Mat Schlosser, who applied the brakes and rolled to a stop alongside him. According to Johnson’s own account of the event, published in the 1961-62 edition of the Alaska Hunting and Fishing Guide, their conversation was brief:

“What happened to you?”

“Never mind. Get going to Seward and the doctor.”

And they did. Down the rails they traveled, dropping off their friend at the Hotel Sexton before calling on Dr. John Baughman, who came and “sewed up” Johnson’s wounds. By the time The Seward Gateway newspaper reported the incident five days later, on July 25, 1908, Johnson was recuperating at the Coleman House and said he was “feeling pretty well, though stiff and sore.”

Johnson, who was born in 1874 and was trained as a blacksmith, had come to Alaska from Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1904, to work for the Alaska Central Railway as a meat hunter. He and a crew of “mountain hunters” were employed to supply wild game—mostly moose and Dall sheep—for the tables of the men laying track north from Seward.

Over the next 60 years in Alaska, Johnson also subsistence hunted and trapped, prospected for gold, performed other seasonal work for the railroad, was a longshoreman in Seward, worked as a hunting guide in the Kenai Mountains, and became a renowned wildlife photographer, toting his treasured Graflex Speed Graphic camera with him almost everywhere he went.

Hope historian Diane Olthuis, who wrote about Johnson in Goldpan, Trapline & Camera, described him as “small and wiry,” perhaps 5-foot-6 and 120 pounds, with dark hair and a handsome face that featured a lean nose and high cheekbones. She said he was known widely as a fastidious man, who wasted nothing, spoke only when he had something worth saying, had gentlemanly manners, and was unbelievably tough.

Johnson's main cabin near Resurrection Creek.
According U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service historian, Gary Titus, Johnson was one of only 10 residents of Moose Pass in 1920, and the following year he constructed a cabin near Resurrection Creek, 18 miles south of Hope, and moved there. Although he built a home in Moose Pass in 1948, he returned to his mountain cabin and his traplines there until well into his 80s.

But on the afternoon of July 20, 1908, Johnson was a gold miner exploring a knoll  high in the countryside when he was startled by the sight of twin brown bear cubs lying in a patch of alders only about 25 feet away. The appearance of cubs, Johnson knew from experience, almost always meant a sow was nearby.

“I stand perfectly still and give the surroundings a careful, close scrutiny which yields no adult bear,” he wrote. “Where is the mother grizzly? I am sure she is somewhere on the knoll.”

He considered his situation: He was alone and unarmed. In one hand he held a shovel. The pack on his back held a prospector’s pick and a gold pan.

Suddenly, the sow materialized before him, immediately focusing on Johnson with her eyes wide and her nose wrinkling in alarm. A moment later she charged, and Johnson yelled, “Get back! Get back!” But she kept coming.

Johnson swung his shovel and struck the sow on the side of the head. She, on the other hand, swung a paw and cuffed Johnson on the side of his chest. As he went down, she stood over him, then bounded around him and growled before biting him five times.

“She suddenly left me and galloped up toward where the cubs were, squealing and growling all the time,” he wrote. “(Then) she came back again, still growling, and bit me four more times. Perhaps 30 seconds have passed since the bear came in sight, but she has been in continuous, fast action, and I am completely at her mercy.”

It was at this point, as the bear romped away again, Johnson said, that some part of his mind noticed that the sow’s breath smelled of berries.

He didn’t dwell long on the fragrance. Instead, he lay as still as possible, awaiting what he presumed was going to be a death blow from the agitated bear. But the sow did not return, and eventually he rose cautiously and headed back for camp.

“The bear didn’t shake me and didn’t inflict tearing bites,” Johnson wrote. “In the whole battle I received only one serious bite. The shock of it, however, stayed with me for years.”

Fortunately for Johnson, the shock was not enough to fog his common sense. After walking for an hour just to reach his camp at Victory Creek, he examined his wounds and decided that a doctor’s needle and thread were going to be required. A few hours later, he was on the handcart with Beyer and Schlosser, rolling noisily toward Seward.

Johnson's trapline cabin.
Johnson did not allow the mauling to prevent him from returning to the mountains. For nearly 30 years, he lived alone in the cabin he had built in 1921. From there, he ran an extensive trapline, hiking into town in the spring to sell furs and buy provisions for another year in the mountains. In 1926, southwest of his home, he constructed a trapline cabin that in 2000 was included in the National Register of Historic Places.

Olthuis reported that Johnson, who had only one working lung—perhaps due to a childhood illness— guided his last hunter in 1955, at the age of 80. He is said to have climbed a tree at age 85, and at age 86 to have made one final 23-mile hike in to his mountain cabin.

But in 1961, his body would no longer cooperate and he finally had to seek assistance. He asked John Kinda to take him on horseback to the mountain cabin, where Kinda said that Johnson “bawled like a baby,” knowing he would never see the place again.

In 1962, he sold the cabin to Cooper Landing guide Max Hamilton, and in 1963—55 years after he had struggled wounded from the mountains to get a ride into town—two neighbors gave Johnson another, final ride to Seward, to the Wesleyan Nursing Home.

He died on the morning of June 14, 1965, at age 90, in the Pioneer Wing of the Seward Hospital. And, as Olthuis said in her book, “An Alaskan era passed with him.”

 
Harry A. Johnson (with rifle) in his later years, in Seward. (Photo from Alaska Digital Archives)

Monday, May 6, 2013

"Let There Be Light"


Main generator for the first electrical-supply power plant in the City of Kenai, 1950s. (Photos courtesy of Rowley family)
LET THERE BE LIGHT

MARCH 2010

As miraculous was the coming of light and power to Kenai, it was even more miraculous that the bringer of this light and power, Frank Rowley, was even alive in 1951 to flip the switch.

In July 1946, the soft-spoken Rowley was involved in an incident that for several consecutive days made the front page of The Anchorage Daily Times, nearly cost Rowley his life, and ended with what was at the time reported to be the largest personal-injury lawsuit west of the Mississippi River.

In late July 1946, Rowley, a civilian electrician employed at Fort Richardson, was completing an electrical power plant in Anchorage that would become known as Mountain View Light & Power and would eventually supply about one-fourth of the city with electricity. In pursuit of a fuel tank that he needed for his plant, Rowley visited the business of Z. E. “Slim” Eagleston, who owned and operated Alaska Salvage, a junkyard just north of E. Fifth Avenue, near Merrill Field. There, the two men made a deal.

However, the agreement between Rowley and Eagleston, who reportedly had once shot and killed a man during a card game in Wyoming, apparently soured. At about 8:30 a.m. on July 30, Rowley drove to Eagleston’s personal residence at 209 Fifth Avenue to voice his displeasure.

James Foote, who witnessed the ensuing confrontation, testified in a preliminary hearing that he heard Eagleston say to Rowley, “You can’t come to my place and call me a liar.” Then, according to testimony, Eagleston asked Rowley to take his glasses off, whereupon the junk dealer hit the electrician, who fell into a wood pile.

Eagleston then seized a heavy No. 2 shovel that had been leaning against a shed, and Rowley grabbed Eagleston by the arm to prevent him from wielding it; however, he was unable to prevent the junkman from smashing the implement onto the crown of his head.

Another witness, Louis Strutz, testified that he saw Eagleston deliver two blows with the shovel after striking Rowley three times with his fists. Rowley crumpled to the ground, his skull fractured, his brain injured. Foote ran for a wet towel, which he applied to Rowley’s wound, and then rushed to call a doctor.

About three hours before FBI agents arrested Eagleston, Rowley was rushed to Providence Hospital, where his condition was assessed as critical and one of the doctors prepared to perform brain surgery.

And this is where good fortune stepped in.


The highly regarded, Stanford-trained Dr. Howard Romig, who was the Rowley family physician, learned of the incident and convinced Frank’s wife, Vena, to allow him to perform the operation. She consented, and Romig went to work—first placing a call to some pre-eminent doctors in New York for advice, then reading several medical journals on the subject of brain surgery before finally operating while conferring the whole time by radio-phone with the doctors in New York.

The surgery lasted about six hours, during which time Romig extracted a tiny piece of metal from Rowley’s brain and removed a portion of his damaged frontal lobe. After a lengthy convalescence, Rowley recovered, although his speech and memory were likely somewhat impaired by the assault and the medical procedure.

In the lawsuit that followed, Rowley sued Eagleston for $55,000 (about $600,000 in today’s money), and won just enough, according to his son Raymond, to cover medical and legal expenses and buy new dresses for his three daughters.

*****

In the years that followed, Rowley began to explore a move to the relatively untapped electrical market of the western Kenai Peninsula, where only the Homer Electric Association had any sort of foothold.

Finally, four years after the assault, according to an account written by Vena Rowley, Frank sold his power plant to the Rural Electrification Administration—it was eventually controlled by the Chugach Electric Association—and made the move to Kenai.

There, with a small group of linemen from Anchorage and a collection of equipment that nobody else wanted, Frank Rowley made one of the most important steps toward modernization in the history of Kenai: bringing the small fishing village into the age of electrification.

Frank Rowley performs piston maintenance.
In a community that had few private generators, in a place where only kerosene lamps flickered in the windows of homes after nightfall, Rowley brought electric light. To the throbbing diesel engine inside his Kenai Power plant in Old Town Kenai, he hooked up a series of electrical grids that would act as the template for the modern infrastructure that serves the city now.

Starting after his first visit to Kenai in 1949, he had acquired the property for his power plant and, with the help of the Anchorage linemen, used military-surplus equipment to auger holes for the treated poles that would hold the transmission lines they strung throughout the village.

The first lines were made from galvanized number-nine steel wire salvaged from old fish traps, and he began generating power through those lines to about 50 subscribers in 1951. Initially the power came from an array of three small generators—two 50-kilowatt International Harvesters and one 60-kilowatt General Motors 6-71 series—and later from a mammoth Fairbanks-Morse engine that he managed to resurrect from the junkpile.

The 1920s-vintage engine, according to his long-time employee, Hedley “Hank” Parsons, was a 32-E, a four-cylinder monstrosity that had been used in the construction of the Distant Early Warning system in northern Alaska and had become so battered that it was considered a complete loss.

According to Rowley’s son, Raymond, who still lives in Kenai, the journals on the crankshaft had been pounded so much that it was no longer round, and the engine had run out of oil. Still, Rowley saw potential in it, and he had it shipped in pieces from Nome to Kenai, where he hand-repaired the damage and then reassembled the entire machine.

He bolted it to a concrete slab about five feet below the surface of the ground, and then he built a metal building over it and a shop out in front of it. Out near the front of the shop he placed a 5,000-gallon barrel of diesel fuel to run the engine, and nearby he later added an auxiliary 2,000-gallon barrel.

Parsons, who now lives in New Hampshire, said that when Rowley began his electrification project in Kenai, many members of the community eyed him skeptically. Some of them, he said, “made fun of Frank because they didn’t know what the hell he was doing. And then he lit up the whole town and supplied power to the canneries in the summertime.”

Suddenly, no one was laughing any more.

Once Kenai residents got electricity, “the whole town depended on it,” said former borough mayor Stan Thompson. And that dependency came with a cost.

Rowley’s dedication to keeping his power plant running meant that he was on-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Donnis Thompson remembered that Rowley became so accustomed to the loud, rhythmic pulsing of the generator that he frequently said, “I don’t hear noise. I hear silence.” And when he heard silence, he knew that something was wrong.

When a shutdown occurred, Rowley responded rapidly. “If he was driving a nail, he’d drop the hammer and go,” said Stan Thompson. “He would really tear off.”

In fact, Rowley was so dedicated to the maintenance of his plant that he lived next door to it with his wifeand their five children: Effa, Billie, Aileen, Frank Jr. and Raymond. Their home was an old Russian cabin, onto which they had added extra rooms.

Down the gravel street and abutting the Thompsons’ business, Kenai Korners, the Rowleys had a small office for Kenai Power, necessary because, in addition to supplying electricity, they also had to bill their subscribers for its use, which meant reading meters, sending out statements, and collecting on bills left unpaid.

Vena, with help from her daughters, did most of the work in the office, where they also sold electrical-related items. The Thompsons remember that Frank also had a large chest freezer in the office, and onto it he once dumped the hundreds of pieces of a jigsaw puzzle for customers and visitors to work on when they stopped by.
The Kenai Power main complex.


On an everyday basis, Rowley worked hard for the people of Kenai. Evelyn Akers wrote in Once Upon the Kenai: “It was always a challenge to get through the first part of the Sunday morning services before Frank Rowley started his weekly maintenance on the generator. Often there was no power; other times, if the voltage was low, the organ would sound like an ancient Victrola badly in need of being wound.”

 

*****

Frank and Vena had married in 1932, and neither of them could doubt the other one’s sense of toughness and determination. Vena, who died at age 93 in 2006, had been raised on a sheep ranch in Wyoming, where by age 10, according to her obituary, she spent her summers with her camp wagon, a shotgun in hand, and her sheepdog, Jackie, at her side. Her mother had died when Vena was just 13, and she had been on her own by age 16.

Frank, the tenth child in a brood of 13, was born in 1905 and was raised on a ranch in Colorado. According to his son Raymond, Frank’s birth name was Finis—French for “the end” and usually pronounced “fee-NEE”—and was actually pronounced “FY-niss.” The name, said Raymond, was meant to indicate that he would be the final child: “He was supposed to be the last. His mother was trying to put the brakes on, but it didn’t work.”

Rowley’s father had died when Frank was in second grade, and his mother had died only a year later, leaving him to live with an older sister until he reached the age of 16, when he decided to leave home, change his name, and hop aboard a freight train bound for Tulsa, where another sister lived.

Unfortunately for Rowley, “free rides” came with a price. He was arrested in Tulsa and put to work on a chain gang doing road work. After he had served his time, he got a job in a Tulsa hospital, sharpening scalpels for surgeons and cleaning up after them. The doctors took a liking to this teen-ager and sent him off to a trade school in Chicago, where he learned to operate a machine shop and the ins and outs of the electrical business—all while earning 50 cents a week for doing shop work.

A few years later, he joined one of his brothers in Wyoming to open an industrial machine shop. During the oil boom in that state, the Rowley shop became the biggest industrial-electric machine shop in all of Wyoming. Frank Rowley was only 28 years old.

Married then, and with a growing family, Frank and Vena decided in 1938 to head north to Alaska, where they saw in the young city of Anchorage the opportunity to produce and sell electricity.
Frank Rowley with son, Raymond, outside their Anchorage power plant, 1948-49.


*****

Despite the severe cranial injury he had received in the altercation with Slim Eagleston, Rowley thrived in Kenai. According to Raymond Rowley, Frank took off only three personal days in more than a decade of supplying Kenai with power. Raymond remembers once, when Frank was 55, he stayed up for three days straight (with only one two-hour nap) to keep the engines going and the power flowing.

Of his father, Raymond says, “He was the toughest man I ever met in my life, easily.”

Throughout his life, Frank Rowley demonstrated that it took a lot to keep him down. When Rowley had attended the Chicago trade school, a metal shard hit his unprotected right eye, and when the eye became infected he lost the use of it. At the time of the Eagleston incident, Rowley had had his right socket filled with a glass eye and had taken to wearing spectacles.

As he worked with electricity, he also built up a tolerance for being shocked. Parsons, his long-time employee, remembers: “I’d seen him going around testing circuits. Now this was low voltage, you know, house voltage, and he’d touch his fingers to his tongue and go around and check the voltage that way. I asked him one time, I said, ‘Jesus, Frank, how can you do that?’ He said, ‘Oh, you get used to it.’”

Raymond also recalled the time that some of Frank’s linemen were placing a thirty-foot power pole, complete with glass insulators, into the ground. “The line (hoisting the pole) came loose, and the pole started to fall. Everybody ran for their life. My dad ran over underneath it, and caught it just enough to break the fall so that it didn’t break the glass insulators.”

*****

In the end, however, Rowley’s indomitable spirit was not enough to save Kenai Power. After moving his power plant to Sport Lake near Soldotna to take advantage of a nearby natural-gas wellhead and then signing a contract to supply power to the military base at Wildwood, he was expanding and improving his system of power lines when he ran into union problems.

Rowley’s children still harbor some resentment toward the agencies and individuals responsible for those problems, but they prefer to remain publicly quiet about the details. By 1963, the ensuing lawsuits and the financial strain on Rowley forced him to sell his company to the City of Kenai, and HEA acquired the utility some years later.


Frank Rowley.
While many people who were in the central peninsula in the 1950s remember Rowley now only for the electricity he provided, his family hopes that he will also be remembered for the service he gave to Kenai during the months leading up to its incorporation as a first-class city in 1960.

Rowley, who was an original signer of the city charter and later served on the city council, pushed hard for the incorporation of as much land as possible, with the idea of creating a large tax base from which to extract money for needed services.

Meanwhile, bereft of his power company, he continued to serve the area in any capacity he could, including running a freight barge to wherever his contracts required. Then, at age 65, while riding on a return trip from Anchorage with a friend in October 1970, he suffered a cardiac arrest and died.

Despite his passing, he left an indelible mark upon the central peninsula. Frost Jones, who was a retail clerk in Kenai throughout the 1950s, once wrote about the first night that she and her husband, Casey, spent in an apartment near the Kenai bluff: “We went to sleep that night to the throb of the Kenai Power diesel plant that Frank Rowley built and managed in the middle of town. The power was off and on some, but Frank really tried hard to keep it going.”

It was tough to keep that good man down.

 

 

Friday, May 3, 2013

"That Which We Call a Rose...."

One of the last remaining pieces of the wreck of the Corea in 1890.


THAT WHICH WE CALL A ROSE….

April 2010

Our perception of what is historically important is often determined by the names we assign to the events or objects that reflect that history. A name acts like a marker, reminding us of the past. Consequently, when a name disappears, the associated history tends to follow. For example:

Mike Steik, who was born in Ninilchik in 1934, can remember an old marine navigation map that he once kept rolled up in his boat when he fished commercially in the early 1950s. On that map, just south of Corea Creek, lay a stretch of shoreline clearly labeled “Corea Bend.”

Since he stopped fishing after he was drafted into the military in 1956, Steik said he has lost track of that map, and he can’t remember seeing one since that featured the name “Corea Bend.”

Ninety-two-year-old Nick Leman, who was born in Ninilchik in 1917 and honeymooned with his wife, Marian, in a small cabin near Corea Bend in August 1947, said that that stretch of shoreline has been called Corea Bend as far back as he can remember. His 90-year-old brother, Joe Leman, concurs.
"Corea Bend" can be seen penciled into this old
map depicting east-side fish traps.


These days, real estate maps of the area nearby—just west of the Sterling Highway, at about Milepost 126—typically show a street called Corea Bend Road that curls along the southern edge of Corea Bend Subdivision. Some such maps may show and label tiny Corea Creek, but they will not show Corea Bend itself.

In his 1971 Dictionary of Alaska Place Names, Donald J. Orth offers a specific entry for Corea Creek—including its origin dating back to a 19th-century shipwreck in the area—but does not even mention Corea Bend.

And Alaska historian Robert N. DeArmond, who founded the Alaska Northwest Publishing Company, wrote in the 1970s that Corea Bend used to appear on local maps and charts but had been “unfortunately” omitted from more recent editions.

The reasons for this cartographical vanishing act are unclear. Perhaps Corea Bend owes its disappearance to its lack of geographical prominence, since it neither juts outward like Anchor Point nor sags inward like Chickaloon Bay. It is not even as clearly defined as the mile-long Corea Creek near its northern head.

In fact—since the bulk of the shipwreck was likely pillaged early on by scavengers and then pulverized more than a century ago by the forces of ice and tide—the creek is the only named physical reminder of an incident that shook up the fledgling Cook Inlet cannery world 120 summers ago.

 

The three-masted wooden bark Corea was built in Boston in 1868, and she began making supply and passenger runs from San Francisco to Cook Inlet in the spring of 1885. On her fateful final voyage, she departed the California port on March 27, 1890, and nearly a month later she was cruising up the inlet when disaster struck.

The Corea hard aground below Kalgin Island, 1890.
In “thick weather” at about 3 a.m. on April 23, and running against a strong outgoing tide, according to the official Wreck Report filed for the ship’s owner, the Arctic Fishing Company, she ran hard aground of a sandbar approximately six miles south of Kalgin Island. There, below a landmark that on an 1802 map had been named Isla de Peligro (or “Island of Danger”), her voyage halted as the tide continued to ebb, and within a few hours she sat high and dry.

An 1890 photograph (from the H. M. Wetherbee Collection) taken of the Corea early the following morning shows her sails at half-mast, her hull almost entirely on dry land, men on her deck, the seas calm, and a stack of her coal and some other materials in two separate piles alongside her keel.

This photo also clearly illustrates the impressive size of the vessel: 133.4 feet from bow to stern, 31.5 feet from port to starboard, and 18 feet deep. She weighed nearly 565 tons and had been carrying a cargo weighing about 500 tons—mostly coal and cannery tin and other cannery supplies—in addition to a 19-man crew and 97 passengers, 77 of whom were Chinese laborers bound for work at the Kasilof cannery, according to “Canneries of Kasilof and Kenai, 1889-1896,” a Wetherbee photographic display at Kenai Peninsula College.

After striking the sandbar, according to a May 1890 article in the Daily Alta California, “the crew and Chinese passengers were put to work at the pumps.” The ship’s master, Captain H.H. Wheeler, then waited for the tide to rise again and assessed the damage.

The Corea, beached on what became known as Corea Bend, 1890.
The Wreck Report states: “Got her off the reef and found the vessel was filling”—12 feet of water in the hold, according to a notation on the Wetherbee photograph—“so ran her 25 miles in sinking condition to East shore of Cook’s Inlet and beached her.”

Wetherbee photos of the second beaching site clearly show that the vessel rammed ashore at the mouth of what would become known as Corea Creek, about 15 miles south of the canneries on the Kasilof River. One of those photos also shows shipwrecked passengers and crew from the Corea encamped along the shoreline near the creek mouth.

At this camp, according to oral history collected by Bobbie Oskolkoff of Kenai, was Oskolkoff’s great-grandfather, Robert James Kelly, who at some point walked north with a group of the Chinese laborers to the Arctic Fishing Company cannery at the Kasilof River mouth.

Crew and passengers of the Corea, encamped on the east-side beach. Note
the break in the bluff in the background: That is the mouth of Corea Creek.
Although these men were likely seeking employment, it is unknown what they found. Because of the wreck, AFC did no canning in the summer of 1890. A second Kasilof cannery was built that same year by George W. Hume and, according to the KPC display, the Hume cannery became the primary operation in Cook Inlet that year because of the shipwreck of the Corea.

Articles in both the Daily Alta and the San Francisco Call from the summer of 1890 state that, after the beaching, nearly every movable item on the ship was brought ashore and saved, and parts of the ship were dismantled.

“A survey was held on the bark and resulted in her being condemned. She was afterwards sold as she lay for $355,” said the Daily Alta. The Call referred to the sale as an “auction” and said that both “the cargo and hull” were sold together.

According to two separate articles in the Daily Alta, most of the crew and passengers, all of whom survived, were eventually were rescued by another member of the AFC fleet, the steamer Francis Cutting, which hauled the men to Kodiak.

At some point in May, the steamer Bertha carried Captain Wheeler, Chief Mate Oliver, the second mate and two seamen from the Corea back to San Francisco. Some of the rest of the “crew and fishermen” from the Corea were returned to San Francisco later that summer aboard the schooner Glen.

Ultimately, as stated in the Wreck Report and attested to by AFC owner/manager F.P Kendall, insurance covered most of the losses—except those incurred by the cannery. The vessel had been valued at $15,000 and insured for $12,500, and its cargo had been valued at $45,000 and insured for $41,600.

 

Today, only one remnant of the Corea is still known to exist. Although it has been shoved south along the shoreline far from its original resting place, and can be seen only when the tides along Corea Bend are quite low, the approximately 80 feet of water-logged beams serve as a reminder of both the power of nature and the importance of this local historical event.

Someday, however, the wearing actions of tide and time may erode the last bits of the old wooden bark, the name of the tiny stream at the wreck site may fade from all maps and charts as did the stretch of beach, and the wreck of the Corea will become little more than an interesting factoid glimpsed by researchers studying the history of Cook Inlet fisheries.

Examining a big piece of the old wreck.