SITKA Administrative History

Chapter 1:
DESCRIPTION OF THE RESOURCE (continued)

Supplements to original resources

The original list of component resources was supplemented as the years passed. Various officials suggested adding resources that were either not immediately, or were never, made a part of the monument.

In 1916, for instance, General Land Office Special Agent J.A. Moore recommended without result that Sheldon Jackson Museum, nearby on the campus of the Sitka Training School, be acquired for the monument. [39]

Visual aesthetics within the monument were identified again as monument values in the early 1920s. Alaska Road Commission and National Park Service officials opposed wheeled vehicle traffic inside the monument in order to preserve the attractiveness of the area. [40] The vista from the monument toward the sea also came under consideration again. This occurred at least as early as 1923, when road commission and park service officials corresponded regarding the visual intrusion of a powerline that ran along the monument boundary. [41]

Wildlife resident in the monument had achieved recognition as values by 1924, when the President of the Alaska Road Commission notified National Park Service headquarters in Washington by telegram that a hunter had been apprehended shooting at tame deer and other wildlife in the park. [42]

In 1926, Stephen T. Mather, director of the National Park Service, approved efforts of the Alaska Historical Society and the Sitka Commercial Club to construct a replica of a Russian block house in the park. This activity added another value to the monument. [43]

The following year, in 1927, territorial and park service officials considered retrieving additional totem poles from abandoned Native villages in Southeast Alaska and relocating them in Sitka National Monument. This idea had been raised as early as 1921 and would be considered again and again without action through the 1970s. [44]

In 1933, Park Service officials rejected a feature that Sitka residents desired be added to the monument, a plaque commemorating Alaskan photographer E.W. Merrill. [45] In 1938, Chief of Forestry J. D. Coffman visited the monument. He reinforced the idea of the park as a place of recreation for Sitkans, with a description of its city park-like usage. [46]

Two years later, in 1940, the first park service employee stationed at the monument proposed acquisition of two properties being disposed of by the Coast and Geodetic Survey. In doing so, he noted their historical value. One site, where the Coast and Geodetic Survey had quartered its employees, was the location of the "Old Russian Tea Gardens." A no-longer-needed magnetic station and variation stand was cited as the site of an old blockhouse. [47] It is likely, however, that the proposed acquisition had more to do with the critical shortage of housing in Sitka than with the historical value of the property involved. Park service officials were in an acquisitive mood. That same year, Mount McKinley Superintendent Frank T. Been recommended that the service acquire Castle Hill and salvage the wreck of the Russian vessel Neva. [48]

Also in 1940, navy efforts to extract gravel from the mouth of Indian River stimulated consideration of the scenic values of the monument areas adjacent to Indian River. [49] This concern was expressed again the following year when National Park Service officials protested navy tree-cutting within the monument. [50]

World War II activity also added a series of machine gun pits to the monument. Remnants of these can be seen along the seaward side of Lovers' Lane. This fulfills, in part, the suggestion of an army officer with an unusual understanding of future concerns. A Maj. Pomeroy (First Name Unknown), in charge of sea coast defenses in the monument, took National Park Service personnel to the site of a gun and ammunition position. He suggested that it be left intact as after the war it would have historical value. [51]

Private property adjacent to the western park boundary was added to the monument on February 25, 1952. This increased the total monument size to 54.33 acres. [52]

One component park value was lost, and another created, in 1959 and 1960. In 1959, the replica Russian blockhouse constructed within the park boundaries in 1926 was bulldozed and burned because it had become a hazard to visitors. Then the park service began construction of still another replica blockhouse, this time in downtown Sitka. This replica, located on federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management, was completed in 1961. [53]

A major new component resource was added to monument values in 1965 when the visitor center was dedicated. It incorporated a cultural center for traditional Native arts and crafts and a history museum.

The Department of the Interior's Indian Arts and Crafts Board had established a major retraining program for Alaska Native artisans at Sitka in 1962. When the new Sitka National Monument visitor center opened, the retraining program was moved there. The program included five related workshops: wood and ivory carving, metalwork, lapidary, stone carving, and design and block printing. Talented Natives were employed as demonstration aides to develop new and upgraded craft products.

It took some time to define the nature of the resource that the new cultural center represented. The National Park Service and the Indian Arts and Crafts Board funded it jointly. The Indian Arts and Crafts Board initially viewed it as a place where traditional arts and crafts from Native cultures throughout Alaska might be preserved and taught. Sitka's Tlingit community viewed it as a place most appropriate for preservation and teaching of Tlingit, or at most Northwest Coast Indian, arts and crafts that might be preserved and taught. The National Park Service viewed it as a place where Native arts and crafts could be demonstrated and interpreted, not as a training program.

The National Park Service was in the middle until the regional director recommended the Tlingit position to the national director. It was not until July of 1968 that the Indian Arts and Crafts Board grudgingly accepted the resource definition put forward by Sitka's Tlingits. [54]

The new visitor center also included a small history museum. Artifacts for the display came from Sheldon Jackson Museum and from a small collection that had been loaned or given to the monument itself by Sitka residents. [55]

The Russian Bishop's House was the last major resource added to Sitka National Historical Park. The National Park Service purchased it in 1972. This came a decade after the Secretary of the Interior designated the building, then known as the Russian Mission Orphanage, as a National Historic Landmark.

Landmark status for the Russian Bishop's House was based on the building's association with Ioann Veniaminov, then Bishop of Kamchatka, the Kuriles, and the Aleutian Islands (later Saint Innocent, Apostle to Alaska), most famous of the Russian Orthodox clergy to work in Alaska. Additional justifications for the building's landmark status included its role as the educational and administrative headquarters of the Orthodox Church in Alaska, and its importance as an example of period Russian architecture. [56]

The Russian American Company built the structure in 1842-1843 to serve as the residence, administrative center, and private chapel of Veniaminov. A school building, constructed in 1897; and a small cottage known as House No. 105, built in 1887, are satellites to the building. [57] In the early 1980s, traditional recreation values of walking for pleasure, natural history observation, and so forth were supplemented by a fitness trail constructed on the east side of Indian River.