Individuals deciding to explore Kenai’s historic district might start their journey by turning off the Kenai Spur Highway onto Main Street by the Kenai Visitors & Cultural Center, then taking a right onto Overland Avenue. About 700 feet from this turn, the road bends left, and at this point a cluster of buildings, at least two of which are liberally flaking white paint, comes into view.
In the front of the building numbered 502A is an information sign, telling visitors that, more than 40 years earlier, this structure had been the headquarters for the Kenai National Moose Range, predecessor of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. Before that, according to the sign—which does contain some minor inaccuracies—this parcel of land was home to an agricultural experiment station.
The history of this experiment station goes way back—to just before the turn of the last century, when the village called Kenai contained only about 150 residents.
In fact, the land set aside for what became known as the Kenai Station was surveyed just two months before a three-masted ship called the Agate appeared in Kachemak Bay with a collection of New York argonauts comprising the Kings County Mining Company.
While the Kenai Station was being surveyed, the U.S. Army was also conducting an exploratory expedition in Cook Inlet to inventory its resources and contemplate its transportation possibilities.
Elsewhere, this was the time of the Klondike and Nome gold rushes. The mining towns of Hope and Sunrise were still rife with dreams of riches. Salmon canneries were flourishing at the mouths of the Kenai and Kasilof rivers, and trading posts were transforming Native cultures’ communal and bartering system into a cash-based economy.
Big-game hunting was attracting wealthy clients from around the world. In five years, railway construction out of Resurrection Bay would cause the founding of Seward. Steamships would soon connect the Kenai Peninsula to the Lower 48 states.
Times were changing, and a government scientist in Sitka was about to expand his operations to Kenai and beyond.
The Professor
Charles Christian Georgeson, who was born June 26, 1851, on the island of Langeland off the coast of Denmark, emigrated to the United States in 1873 to gain a university education. Later, he taught at Kansas State Agricultural College, through which he met many young men who would eventually join him in agricultural work in Alaska.
As a naturalized, married, 47-year-old man in 1898, Prof. Georgeson, accompanied by his wife and three daughters, arrived in Sitka, which was then the capital of Alaska. He had been sent there by James Wilson, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, who reportedly told Georgeson, “Act as if the country is your own and go ahead. Washington, D.C., is a long way from Alaska, and all I want is results.”
Wilson’s desire for outcomes was connected to a series of congressional and presidential actions stretching back to 1862, when Pres. Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act into law, thus establishing land-grant colleges in the United States and its territories to provide education in the science and economics of agriculture.
Five years later, the United States purchased Alaska from Russia. Twenty years after that, the Hatch Act provided for a system of agricultural experiment stations to provide science-based research information to farmers. And a decade later, Alaska was granted the right to establish agricultural experiment stations of its own.
Sitka was chosen as the site of the first such station because of “accessibility and climate,” according to Georgeson, whose full job title was Special Agent in Charge of the United States Agricultural Experiment Stations (for Alaska). “It was deemed necessary to locate this station at a point which could at the same time be in a reasonably easy communication with the rest [of Alaska],” Georgeson wrote. “Sitka was deemed to be that point.”
Alaska’s earliest agricultural-experiment efforts focused on its long coastline, where the vast majority of its residents lived and where transportation of people and produce was thought to be easiest. The main idea, however, was to help isolated pockets of miners, fishermen and settlers better feed themselves and their neighbors.
After Georgeson spent the spring and early part of the summer of 1898 getting his program organized and under way in Sitka, he traveled in August to Kenai. There, he surveyed and staked out the land he considered appropriate for an agricultural experiment station that he believed was destined to succeed because of the growth potential he foresaw on the Kenai Peninsula. The parcel, located just north of the village and abutting the eastern boundary of Russian Orthodox Church property, comprised half a section, or 320 acres.
Georgeson submitted his paperwork to the Department of Agriculture, and on Jan. 31, 1899, Pres. William McKinley signed Executive Order #148, setting aside the land. By no later than February, Georgeson had hired his first Kenai Station superintendent, 24-year-old H.P. Nielsen, of Denmark, Kansas.
During the year prior to landing the Kenai job, Nielsen had been completing his agricultural college education and performing his military duty as part of the 22nd Kansas Volunteer Infantry in Company M of the Kansas Corps. He served from May 2 to Nov. 3 of 1898 and was officially credited with participation in the Spanish American War.
As he prepared to leave for Alaska, his hometown newspaper, the Lincoln Republican, announced his departure and said that Nielsen would be taking with him a Kodak camera and “a great quantity of supplies.”
“He is going out well equipped,” the paper claimed, “and will make the most of his opportunities while there.”
Prof. Georgeson’s annual salary in 1899 was $3,000. His “expert assistant” in Sitka, Charles H. Robison, earned $1,200. In Kenai, Nielsen, also listed as an expert assistant, was paid $900 for the year.
The Lincoln County Man
Hans Peter Nielsen was born in July 1874 in Lincoln County, Kansas, and he could travel back there only when he had enough time off to leave the roadless Kenai Peninsula and journey home—a trek that could take several weeks in each direction, depending upon weather and other factors.
Mail traveling into and out of Kenai could be irregular, particularly in winter, but Nielsen tried to send periodic open letters to the editor to keep family and friends back in Lincoln Country apprised of his activities and of his impressions of life on the sparsely settled peninsula. While his official Kenai Station reports could be dry and technical at times, his letters home tended to be far more colorful and opinionated.
It appears that the Lincoln Republican did not publish all of Nielsen’s correspondence but did put nearly 10 of them in print, starting on Aug. 31, 1899, with a letter that Nielsen had dated July 27 in Kenai.
After a brief report on local commercial-fishing success, Nielsen began discussing agriculture: “Prof. Georgeson made us a visit from Sitka last Friday. He was greatly pleased, or seemed to be, with what we have accomplished here this summer.”
Among his accomplishments, Nielsen mentioned a garden, one-third of an acre in size, in which he had sowed wheat, oats, barley, buckwheat, flax, clover, alfalfa and field peas, plus a variety of vegetables. “Everything is growing nicely,” he said, “considering that our summer commenced with the beginning of this month [July]. The mean temperature for June was 47.5 degrees F., while for this month it was 60 degrees … or thereabouts.”
Nielsen—and probably a temporary worker or two hired from the village—had also been making prodigious construction efforts: a 12-by-14-foot stable, 12-by-20-foot machine shed and an 8-by-8-foot silo, all built of logs from native timber and topped with board roofs.
To provide hay for future livestock, they spent several days hiking “up the Inlet about six miles” to find good native grasses, which they cut with scythes for eight hours each day before dragging themselves tiredly back to Kenai.
On the bright side, he said, the area had had very little rain all summer, so far: “Sunshine, and sunshine, all the time, yet it never gets too hot.”
He ended this first letter with a caution: “Above all things, let me warn you not to get the ‘Alaska gold fever.’ It is all a fake of the transportation companies. They are reaping a far richer reward than the luckiest miner. There is at present [late July] a band of 23 members of the Kings County Mining Company of New York camped here, disposing of everything they have, in order to get money to get back home. Several bands have been here this summer in the same fix.”
The historic marker in front of this building at 502A Overland Avenue in Kenai identifies the structure as the former headquarters of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge and the site of the former Agricultural Experiment Station, 1899-1908. Photo by Clark Fair
This 1960 aerial photograph from the Civil Aeronautics Administration shows, from top to bottom, the southern end of the Kenai Airport runway, the Spur Highway and the fledgling city of Kenai. Near the center of the photo is a cluster of white-painted buildings then owned by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which managed the Kenai National Moose Range. Enclosed in a small group of trees south-southwest of these buildings is the Russian Orthodox Church.
