I spent the summers of 2023 and 2024 living on the southside of Kachemak Bay while deconstructing a homesteading cabin dating from Alaska’s statehood. Artifacts have established continuous use of Kachemak Bay by Dena’ina and Sugpiaq groups for the past 1500 years, and before them the Kachemak people settled in the area almost 3000 years ago. Prospectors arrived in the late 1700s, and the US bought Alaska from Russia in 1867. Herring salteries were abundant in the area in the early twentieth century until overfishing decimated the herring population by the late 1920s. The 79-acre site of the cabin was claimed after WWII with special veteran provisions in a revision to the 1862 Homestead Act. In 1959 Alaska was proclaimed a state and around this time the cabin was floated on a steel barge to its final location. The cabin was first occupied by a fisherman and later a schoolteacher as well as a biologist and workers trying to remediate the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The structure provided shelter until the late 1990s.

View additional information on the erasure of the cabin on my Instagram account