Clean Up Alaska Nellie's
Please donate to help us clean up Alaska Nellie's...
Alaska Nellie was a true Alaskan pioneer. She was in her 40s when she moved to Alaska in 1915 to seek her fortune, working for the Post Office, then for the Alaska Rail Road and then serving as Sherriff of a small town. Twice. She built and ran 2 roadhouses offering beds and food to the others coming to Alaska to reinvent themselves. She finally settled with her husband on a spot on the edge of Kenai Lake outside of Seward that they named Lawing after her husband. Together they moved a log cabin they found from across the lake and rebuilt it on the property.
Alaska Nellie welcomed presidents and celebrities from around the world to her roadhouse. She was also full of stories, as they mention in this 1940 Newsreel, but another fact about Alaska Nellie is that she liked to play with the facts:
Click here for more information on Alaska Nellie
My mother, Jackie Sewell, bought Alaska Nellie's in the late 1980's from her best friend, Opal Everett, another wonderful Alaskan character. My mother was a later Alaskan pioneer. Jackie built ships during World War II in the shipyards of San Francisco, while my father served in the Pacific. Both my parents were sheet metal workers and could build a house from the ground up and loved to travel. When the war ended, they hitchhiked across country. They abandoned a plan to sail a ship to sell in Italy when they stranded the ship off the coast of Cuba in shark infested waters. My mother had signed on to the ship as the cook. My sister, who was six weeks old, was signed as the nurse, as she was nursing at the time. My mother and father finally settled on a homesite in Kenai, Alaska in 1954.
In the 60s and 70s, Opal had used Alaska Nellie's as a kind of artists' retreat for the many theater folk she knew and loved. But without a permanent caretaker and money for upkeep, the property continued to decline. There was no livable buildings, no running water and no electricity when my mother moved to Alaska Nellie's property in 1989. In the 30 years since Nellie's death, a fire had destroyed one log cabin and erosion from the lake and shifting sands from the 1964 earthquake (that decimated a good part of neighboring Seward) had undercut Nellie's roadhouse at the very edge of the lake. Visitors and vandals helped themselves to Nellie's trophies and treasures, and even the remaining logs from her roadhouse, using these pre-cut logs to build their own cabins.
At 65, Jackie and her 60 year old sister Jean built a small bed and breakfast out of a trailer and lean-to, run by a generator. They towed a used sleeping trailer unit down from the Alyeska pipeline for additional rooms. After the Exxon oil spill, Alaska Nellie's Bed and Breakfast was full every night for months, supplying beds to the clean up crews, as Nellie had housed the workers for the Alaska Rail Road.
My mother dedicated herself to documenting the stories of anyone with memories of Nellie, and retreiving any lost items of Nellie she could find. Way before the internet, she located Nellie's out of print book and self funded a large run so that everyone who came to Nellie's could read her story in her own words. Each August, Jackie picked the wild strawberries covering the property, decendants of Nellie's original patch. My mother made strawberry shortcake for Nellie's birthday, free to anyone who stopped by.
Jean and Jackie were children of the Depression, and over the years, their inablity to throw anything away further altered the landscape of Nellie's property. They towed a shower unit trailer from the pipeline that they never managed to hook up, and the shower spaces slowly filled with things they saved for later: left over tools, oil cans, and other bits and pieces that could, one day, be useful in a pinch.
By 2004, the warehouse and shower unit were both full of boxes, clothes for babies that had babies of their own,
old stoves, refrigerators, blow dryers, Christmas decorations, and other potentially "useful" items. A full moving truck was parked next to the cabin and never unloaded. Jean had moved away, and my mother remarried in her 70s. Within a few years she and her husband slowly slipped into dementia. The property steadily declined as my brother and I were busy with our families, and neither of us had the money or the time to maintain the property. My mother had always treasured her independence, and so my brother and I were in the difficult position many adult children find themselves, in that we were not always able to protect our mother from those who took advantage of her hospitality and her increasing infirmity.
Alaska Nellie's became a dumping ground for broken down cars and belongings of friends and family. When my mother's husband died, we moved her to an assisted living center in Anchorage. Without anyone living on the property, vandals and squatters further destroyed the buildings and scattered and destroyed my mother's possessions and papers. My mother passed away in 2007, and we gave all her raw video footage and all of Alaska Nellie's items she was able to retrieve to the Seward Museum.
Anyone who visits Alaska Nellie's is struck by the sheer physical beauty of the site, surrounded by mountains on Kenai Lake. That 100 year old cabin Nellie moved across the lake is still standing, although all the windows are broken. Trees grow through abandoned cars.
My family's dream is to clean up the property, restore the cabin, and create a retreat that honors Alaska Nellie and the other Alaskan pioneer women like my mother, Jackie Sewell, her sister Jean Dann, as well as their sister in law Velma Nelson and Opal Everett.
A local Seward demolition company has told us it will cost $40,000 to tow the cars and trucks, demolish and remove the trailers and leanto, clean up the property and strip the historical buildings down to the original studs and logs. The cleanup will begin on August 1st with the goal to finish by September.
Please help us to clean up Alaska Nellie's. Your donation will help pay for the demolition and clean up and will support the first step to save this historical site that means so much to the pioneer history of Alaska and to my family. All contributions will go directly to pay for the clean up effort. Thank you.
