EARTHQUAKE ANNIVERSARY - Today is the 49th anniversary of the Good Friday Earthquake that twisted Anchorage, launched a tsunami that nearly leveled Valdez, and shook the entire state. This commemorative coin (Catalog number UA98-13-18) is part of the museum’s history collection.
On this day in 1964, the largest earthquake in Alaska began at 5:36 in the evening. Across south-central Alaska, ground fissures, collapsing structures, and tsunamis were unleashed.
Lasting nearly three minutes, it was the most powerful recorded earthquake in U.S. and North American history, and the second most powerful ever measured by seismograph. It had a magnitude of 9.2, making it the second largest earthquake in recorded history.
This great earthquake and ensuing tsunami took 128 lives (tsunami 113, earthquake 15), and caused about $311 million in property loss. Earthquake effects were heavy in many towns, including Anchorage, Chitina, Glennallen, Homer, Hope, Kasilof, Kenai, Kodiak, Moose Pass, Portage, Seldovia, Seward, Sterling, Valdez, Wasilla, and Whittier.
(via Historic Earthquakes)
It’s been almost 30 years since the mammoth tusks on display in our Gallery of Alaska were prepared. Our Operations Manager Kevin May kept this story from the Fairbanks Daily-News Miner from the days before online archiving.
This is the tiny diary kept by Harry Karstens during the successful 1913 expedition to the summit of Denali. This first ascent is the subject of our next special exhibit, Denali Legacy: 100 Years on the Mountain. We’ll be displaying the journals of most of the five men who made it to the top of the tallest mountain in North America.
The trip began in March 1913 and the group summited in June. Karstens went on to become the first superintendent of Mount McKinley National Park (now known as Denali National Park).
The Ethnology & History lab had an exciting day yesterday. Turns out an artifact from the Leonhard Seppala collection, an anti-aircraft shell tip, was thought to contain explosives after a researcher investigated the piece for a book about the Alaskan dog musher. Collections Manager Angela Linn spent the day tracking down a local responder to determine what to do next. A team from Fort Wainwright responded but found no trace. Thanks to Sgt. Russell and his crew.
The piece has been in our collection since 1968. It was given to Seppala back in 1950, when he visited Tromso, Norway. It comes from the Battleship Tirpitz, which was used in WWII. Seppala’s widow donated it to us, along with many other items, in 1968. A Norwegian researcher is writing a biography of Seppala forwarded images to an historian expert on the Tirpitz. He called the artifact “a fuse” that would have originally contained between 0.5 -2.0 grams of WWII-type high explosives.
Good story about the importance of collections for research and community.
(via Rare $5 Bill from Fairbanks Goes Up for Auction | KUAC)
More on that $5 bill from our Ethnology & History Collections Manger Angela Linn:
“So this is sometimes how the documentation about items in museum history collections is collected. My file on this piece now has twice the number of citations as before. The catalog entry in my database will be much more rich, and our insurance assessment will be much more accurate. Guess I’ll keep my eyes on this story, and others, that are connected to this early form of paper currency in Fairbanks.”
"A third bill is in storage at the University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks, collections manager of ethnology and history Angela Linn said Wednesday. The bill is in pristine condition and looks as if it just came off the printing press, she said, adding that its distinctive quirk is a curve in part of the edge."
EVER SEEN A $5 BILL? We’ve got one of these rare bills, presented by the now defunct First National Bank of Fairbanks, in our ethnology & history collections.
According to the story, this specimen, presented in 1905 to Vice President Charles Fairbanks (our hometown’s namesake), could fetch up to $300,000 at auction this month.
