Photo discovery includes images believed to be first of area

It arrived at the Museum of Alaska Transportation and Industry in 2006 unbidden and unheralded, at the bottom of a box of Alaska artifacts Aleta Dyer had sent from Missouri.

Inside the box, among assorted loose photos from the estate of Robert R. Stroup of Wasilla, Pat Durand, a volunteer at the museum, found a small album with three loose photos and 61 others affixed to thick, dark gray fiber pages.

Durand was surprised and puzzled by what he saw presented on the diminutive album’s aging pages.

Some of the photos had captions like “Glacier head of Chickaloon,” “City of Knik 1898” and “Taking on coal, Cook’s Inlet ‘98.”

“It looks to me like they are the oldest photographs of the area,” he said. “I don’t know of any photos older.”

And Durand known’s reams about local history — enough to know that the city of Knik shown in the album was of an early town site across Cook Inlet in the area where Eklutna is today.

This photo and the one of workmen carrying chunks of coal from a tarp-covered pile on the beach to a boat are the two Durand says are the oldest known photos of what later became known as the Matanuska-Susitna Borough.

But who took these photos more than 100 years ago and how Stroup came to own them are so far mysteries lost to history, Durand said.

Some of the photos are labeled with names, such as “Srg’t Yennet,” and another labeled “N C Griffiths.”

Ralph Hulbert scanned the collection of images and has prepared a three-page summary of captions and the known history of the Stroup collection.

“Robert Stroup was a collector. He was a welder and worked around the state,” he said. “But how he came upon this album his sister has no idea.

Hulbert’s notes about the photos speculate that perhaps Srg’t Yennet was the Sgt. Yanert who explored the area with an 1898 U.S. Army expedition led by Captain Edwin Glenn.

The same year, Lt. William Abercrombie also led a separate U.S. Army expedition in Alaska to search for an all-American route to the developing mining regions of the Yukon, Tanana and Fortymile Rivers, according to U.S. Army Alaska records.

Hulbert said some of the photos are of people who appear to be part of these or similarly well-funded expeditions. The disc of images he scanned also includes some of the reports of the Alaska Expedition, including USGS and military explorations during 1898 and 1899.

“There were dozens of different routes followed by small parties over thousands of miles of generally uncharted wilderness,” Hulbert wrote in the summary included with the photos on the disc.

Durand said while much about the album’s history and creator remains a mystery, he has been able to deduce some details.

“We are presuming — and it’s a big presumption — that there were only so many people wondering around with cameras in 1898 wearing military uniforms and who had the resources to launch such expeditions,” he said. “It’s just a treasure hunt.”

In his own version of “History Detectives,” Durand has made use of tools such as Google Earth to zoom in on the shoreline of Dutch Harbor and confirm the location of one image of a coastal town that had no label.

The previously unknown collection also includes what are perhaps some of the earliest photos of the areas that became the cities of Fairbanks and Seward, he said.

Hulbert said it appears that the photos were made before the cities of Seward and Fairbanks existed, and that the photos were labeled later with those place names.

“The album appears to have stayed in Alaska,” he said. And the annotations were made a few years after the photos were taken.”

Durand said another clue as to who created the photos is contained in the lack of information about their provenance. Unlike commercial photographers who carefully captioned their work and marked it with their names for later resale, expedition photographers didn’t own the work they produced and didn’t usually put their names on their photos, he said.

The two men agree that the photographer likely wasn’t part of the 1898 Glenn or Abercrombie expeditions, but the photographer might have been one of the people they passed on the trail.

“We think that it might be an early packer or guide that had taken these,” Hulbert said.

A copy of the photo album on disc is free with each membership to the Palmer Historical Society.

If you can identify specific locations of any of the photos or the people in them, or the name and purpose of the expedition, contact colony@palmerhistoricalsociety.org.

Contact Heather A. Resz at heather.resz@frontiersman.com or 352-2268.