Welcome to the Collection!

Usually twice a year a volunteer group known as the Acquisitions Committee meets to decide which objects should be incorporated into the Kodiak Historical Society’s permanent collection. It’s a fun group of long time and lifelong Kodiak residents who are familiar with our community’s history and passionate about its preservation. 

Acquisitions Committee members, lifelong Kodiak residents,
and sisters Myrtle Olsen and Martha Randolph pose in front of the
objects recently added into the permanent collection.

This week we had a meeting and decided to welcome 18 objects into the museum’s collection. These newest additions to the collection are like a grab bag of Kodiak history. They range from the very new, like a wooden salmon roe box from Larsen Bay’s Icicle Seafoods cannery, to older objects, like the 1840 mint Russian coin that was likely in circulation in Kodiak during the Russian era.  They represent commerce, like the Bank of Kodiak money barrel and Kraft’s clipboard, and entertainment, such as the Tony’s Place bar glass from the 1940s. And, just in time for the upcoming Crab Festival, we got Crab Fest commemorative coins from 1974 and a pin from the silver jubilee celebration in 1982.

Kraft's operated in Kodiak for over 90 years. This
notebook with pre-printed shopping list is one
object that can tell the business's story long
after its closing. KHS, 2012-11-01.

Few of these objects are particularly glamorous, and someone may wonder what a museum would want them for in the first place. A notebook with a pre-printed shopping list from an old grocery store?  The value of many museum objects doesn’t necessarily rest in their beauty, or how much they cost, or their association with an important person, but in how they document and communicate everyday lives. These mundane objects are tied to specific places that existed in a specific moment in Kodiak’s past. While we can no longer go to Kraft’s to peruse their produce department, from the shopping list we can see that within the bins were onions, carrots, potatoes and, if you were lucky, asparagus.

This Tony's bar glass likely
dates to the early 1940s.
KHS, 2012-03-01.

During future Acquisitions Committee meetings, I ’m hoping to welcome more objects that relate to Kodiak’s businesses and industries. Please get in touch with the museum if you have a stash of local business memorabilia that you are interested in donating to the museum. Future generations will thank you!

Discovering Kodiak through the Census

Kodiak village in 1910. Kodiak Historical Society, P-4.

Last Monday, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) released the 1940 census to the public. This is cause enough for celebration for historians and genealogists, but when the website received millions of hits on the first day, we were given another reason to rejoice (“Look! Look! People are gobbling up history!”).

I used the 1940 release as an impetus to do Kodiak census research. Through SLED (Statewide Library Electronic Doorway), all Alaskan residents have free access to Heritage Quest, a genealogy database that contains Alaska census records. I’ve had a hard time accessing the records from 1930, but I spent the last few days cropping, saving and printing the Kodiak census returns from 1910 and 1920. This is the slog work of history, but the payoff is well worth it.

"Babushka" Parascovia Gregorioff of
Afognak Village. Kodiak Historical Society.

Now that they are printed, these census records have already proved to be handy. Today a researcher was looking at our collection of travelling icons. One hung in the house of Afognak resident Pariscovia Gregorioff, grandmother of the museum’s first curator, Eunice (Von Scheele) Neseth. I browsed through the 1920 census return and found Mrs. Gregorioff. In 1920 Mrs. Gregorioff was a 68 year old widow who lived alone in a rented home and didn’t speak English. Unlike most of her Afognak neighbors, Mrs. Gregorioff was classified “IN” instead of “MXD”; either she or the enumerator identified her as Native rather than of mixed European/ Native descent. Her occupation was listed the same as that of all the women’s: none.  We know this isn’t true, as Mrs. Gregorioff was a midwife who assisted in birthing dozens of children over the course of her long life. This information, albeit incomplete and containing oversights, helps me as the curator of collections to better understand the significance, use, and value of the small bronze icon that once adorned Mrs. Gregorioff’s rented wall.

As a whole, these census records provide an unparalleled snapshot of Kodiak’s past. Unlike manuscripts, journals, and other printed materials which are usually individual accounts of the past, censuses are the record of the entire community, including those who didn’t leave behind other records. When looking at the records, line by line, patterns emerge that give one a good sense of the character of the archipelago in 1910 and 1920.

Englishman H.P. Cope doubled as the
first postmaster in Kodiak and the census
enumerator in 1910.
Kodiak Historical Society, P 284.

For example, I’ve often heard that Afognak was a more substantial village than Kodiak in the past. The 1920 census shows just this: Afognak definitely had a larger population than “Kodiak village,” but it also had a less diverse economy. In Afognak, a few people are listed as working in the general store (there were several stores in town), at the fish hatchery, “public school,” “ranch” and in mining (both copper mining and one occupation written as “gold”). But the vast majority of men are shown to be working for “sal. cannery.” While the preponderance for “fishing” and “sal. cannery” is also very high for Kodiak village during the same 1920 census, there are more places of employment and occupations listed. Kodiak contained salesmen, cooks, machinists, carpenters, a plumber, fox farmers, and servants, for example. As a result, even though Afognak had a larger population, Kodiak was still the economic hub of the archipelago.

However, as seen in the example of Mrs. Gregorioff’s occupation, census records can be deceiving. Most notably for Kodiak, the 1920 census is smaller than the 1910 census.  This goes against what one would think- that the population of the region would grow in that 10 year lapse. Going through the returns page by page provides several explanations. First, it seems that the 1910 enumerator and town postmaster, H.P.  Cope, took more care in counting. Miners Point at Uganik Bay, the few people living at Long Island, the handful of men on Tugidak Island- all were counted.

A Karluk beach seine gang, ca. 1910. The fishermen hailed
from Scandinavia and Italy, while the cannery workers were
Asian and Latin American. Kodiak Historical Society, P-60.

But, more importantly, the 1910 census was taken after the salmon season had started, while the 1920 census was taken before the cannery crews had been transported north. That is why the largest census return for the region in that year was…. Karluk. H.P. Cope travelled to the salmon canneries at Alitak, Karluk and Larsen Bay and enumerated the fishermen as well as the canning crews. The results show a veritable smorgasbord of ethnicities laboring on the Karluk Spit. Aside from the Alutiiq villagers, there are dozens of individuals from Italy, Norway, the Philippines, Mexico, Hawaii, China, a smattering from Germany, Holland, Korea and Chile, all enumerated (and separated) by bunk house.  While this is not news, what’s exciting are the individuals that emerge, like 27 year old Eulogiro Serinas from the Philippines, the Chilean Ivan Fernandez, and 58 year old Gee Yip from China.

Can you imagine finding your Italian great grandfather listed as living in Karluk in 1910? I’m sure that some family researchers have had that very surprise.

Exploring the History of Kodiak's Filipino Community, Part One

Filipino Fulbright scholar Joefe Santarita,
in residence at Kodiak College during the 2011-2012 school year

Last Saturday, Joefe Santarita, Fulbright scholar from the Philippines, gave an enlightening lecture to a standing-room only crowd at the museum on the history and contributions of Kodiak's Filipino community. The contributions of the Filipino community are unquestioned. From cannery work to banking, from military to transportation, Filipinos make up the largest minority in Kodiak and Kodiak's Filipino community is the largest in Alaska. But although many recognize these facts, the over one hundred year history of Filipinos in Kodiak has not received the attention that it deserves, and this is something that the Baranov Museum is looking to remedy.

What do we know about the historical legacy of Filipinos in Kodiak? In Joefe's preliminary research, the earliest mention of a Filipino in the Kodiak archipelago was in 1900, although we are fairly certain that Filipinos have been coming to Kodiak for much longer than that. In fact, in 1788 a Filipino crew member of the Iphigenia at least saw Kodiak Island as the fur trading vessel travelled through Shelikof Strait. Other "Manilla Men" aboard the multi-ethnic whaling and fur trading vessels of that same era were well familiar with the "Kodiak Grounds"- the whaling area near Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska.

However, 1900 is a fair estimate as to the beginning of a sustained Filipino presence in the archipelago since it was after the 1898 Spanish-American War that Filipinos traded one colonial government, Spain, for another, the United States. Although as colonial subjects Filipinos were not considered citizens, they were American "nationals." At that point pensionados, or Filipino students, started travelling to the US to receive higher education. These pensionados usually came from the upper class of Filipino society. As a result, not only were these individuals the first Alaskeros, but also the first to start what can be seen as an historic trend- college students working in Alaskan canneries as a summer job.

As anyone who works or has worked in a cannery knows, this is a tough job. The hours are long, the physical labor exhausting, and the pay is often minimum wage, and those are today's conditions! Imagine what it was to work in a cannery one hundred years ago. During his lecture, Joefe showed the crowd a song that hints at the conditions and emotions of these Filipino student cannery workers.

Cannery workers in the 1940s in an unidentified Kodiak-area cannery.
From the collection of the Baranov Museum/ Kodiak Historical Society

"A Cannery Worker's Song in Dacanay"

It's a hard and lonesome fate

That we face in Alaska

Oh! What a fate!

Stale fat and ill-cooked fish,

Our major, daily dish

From the stingy, bossy Chink

Gives us tummy-ache

Oh, Skies, give approbation

For all these tribulations

Ah! Consolation!

The fish, let it run slow.

To give us less to do,

Or let the work be through

So home we go.

The song hints at the multi-ethnic composition of the canning crew in the slight again the Chinese boss. In the early years of the Alaskan canning industry, there were two contracts. One was between Chinese labor contractors and the cannery, in which the contractors agreed to supply workers, workers' supplies, and the annual salmon pack. The other was between the Chinese labor contractor and the cannery worker. As a result, the Chinese contractors were middlemen who financially benefited from cannery workers' poor living and working conditions, including providing substandard grub, like "stale fat and ill-cooked fish."

Further research is required to figure out more about the stories and experiences of those working in the early canneries, but the 1910 Karluk census data surely piques the imagination.



The canning line inside a Kodiak area cannery in the 1940s.
Baranov Museum/ Kodiak Historical Society



1910 Census, Karluk

White           226

Mixed           19

Aleut             78

Filipino          81

Chinese         67

Mexican        43

Hawaiian       25

Korean          3

Puerto Rican  3 

Chilean          2

Note that there were more Filipinos living in Karluk than Alutiiqs/ Sugpiaqs during the summer that the census was compiled. Also, consider the makeup of today's cannery labor force. How different is it now?

As you can see, the museum is only beginning to scratch the surface in our quest to document the significant history of the Kodiak Filipino community. Please stay tuned for more information as our research continues, and know that we need your help to tell the story. What do you know about the history of Kodiak's Filipino community? Please let us know!

For more information:

Thelma Buchholdt. Filipinos in Alaska: 1788-1958. Anchorage, AK: Aboriginal Press, 1996.

Sue Ellen Liljeblad. "Filipino-Alaska: A Heritage." Alaska Historical Commission, 1978.

Patricia Roppel. Salmon from Kodiak: An History of the Salmon Fishery of Kodiak Island, Alaska. Alaska Historical Commission Studies in History No. 216, 1986.