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WASILLA — The city’s historic townsite is adding another building to its collection — the old post office.

“What started it was we found the old Wasilla Post Office had been repaired and was for sale,” said the city’s public works director, Archie Giddings. “We did consult with the historic society. We asked them, ‘Is this indeed the old Wasilla Post Office?’”

Indeed it was. Dorothy G. Page Museum Director Bethany Buckingham said it’s the city’s second post office. The building had been sitting for sale where Trunk Road meets the Parks Highway. Apparently, before that it had sat for years on private property on Lake Lucille, gathering dust and decaying.

Giddings said the price tag on the building was reasonable — $15,000 — and it made sense to swap it out with a cabin in the museum’s collection.

“We had one building in there that wasn’t quite from Wasilla; it was from Blodgett Lake,” Giddings said.

So that cabin, Buckingham referred to it as the Walter Trensch cabin, is being moved out to the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center.

“We have a trailhead there next to the sports complex for the Wasilla to Big Lake trail,” Giddings said. “It’s kind of fitting with Blodgett Lake being halfway to Big Lake.”

He said James Hastings, who runs the sports complex, thinks he can use the cabin for events at the center, perhaps as a place to house vendors or as some kind of a check-in station. The swap should be complete in the next couple of weeks or so. The cost to complete the job will be $22,000.

Asked if having the post office will complete the museum’s collection, Buckingham said it would not.

“There are many historic buildings in Wasilla. There are a lot that have not been documented,” she said. “A lot of people probably just see them as old, dilapidated buildings and don’t realize the history behind them.”

What would be best, Buckingham thinks, would be to put together some sort of historic downtown walking district, encompassing some of the buildings that aren’t on the historic townsite grounds.

The near-term plan for the post office includes moving in Wasilla’s original post office boxes, on display in the museum’s main building, which is the city’s old meeting house. Buckingham said that will do two things; it will be one step toward making the post office into a reasonable facsimile of what it looked like back in its heyday, and it will also free up space in the meeting house.

Lately, the museum grounds have looked a lot like a construction zone. In addition to moving the buildings, the city is also replacing rotting logs on two of the historic buildings — the blacksmith’s shop and the barn. When that’s all done, work will proceed to finish replacing the fence.

“We’re pretty much just trying to get the town site looking nice again,” Buckingham said.

It’s just part of the museum’s overall mission of freezing a moment in time to give visitors a snapshot of what Wasilla used to be.

“We may go back to only 1917, but that’s still a lot of history that we have crammed in from 1917 to today,” Buckingham said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.