Heated by hot springs, Tenakee Springs Museum tells community’s story

Tenakee Springs, Alaska is a dirt road town with a 10 mile per hour speed limit. Time seems to slow down. Few interactions are in passing. Residents actually bathe together in a communal hot springs sheltered from the rain. And now, there’s a place where time comes to a complete standstill.  During a reporting trip around Chichagof Island, KCAW visited the new Tenakee Springs Museum housing the history of this storied southeast town.

Downloadable audio.

On a clear day in January 2012, Carlene Allred broke out a video camera to film the renovation of the Tenakee Springs Museum. Moving inside the building, she asks her husband, Kevin Allred, “What’s going on in here?” He cheerfully responds, “We’re renovating this liquor store and making it in to a museum.”

Kevin has figured out a way to heat the structure with geothermal energy. That’s right. The Tenakee Springs Museum is warmed entirely by the town’s naturally occurring hot springs. “The best source seems to be the excess heat that’s leftover from heating the changing room of the bathhouse,” Allred explains.

Years of hammering, sanding, and painting – sometimes to the sounds of ABBA – are compiled by Carlene in a 30-minute YouTube video. The renovation work was paid for through a combination of local dollars and a grant from the Alaska State Museum. 

The Allred’s weren’t in town when I visited Tenakee Springs. But their handiwork and others is evident in the schoolhouse red structure that is now home to the Tenakee Historical Collection. Carlene filmed the grand opening ceremony too, which is at the end of the YouTube video.

Curator Vicki Wisenbaugh held the ribbon at the grand opening alongside Director Beret Barnes, officially opening the museum on July 2, 2017. The ribbon was cut by intern Kate Duffy. Duffy spent eight weeks helping develop the layout for the museum. Ninety people attended, which is the vast majority of Tenakee’s population.

Today, Wisenbaugh and I are standing outside the museum. The door is ajar. They logged over 700 visitors between July 2017 and July 2018, some unexpected. At that very moment, a squirrel attempts to dart inside. “Eh. Don’t you go in there, bud!,” Wisenbaugh shouts. “We’ve had them in there before. It’s pretty exciting.” Luckily, the squirrel does a U-turn.

Inside the museum, you can faintly hear the sound of the ocean beneath the pilings. It’s one room and the oak cases are full. There’s fish hooks, seine twine, and a metal stencil to mark a package as “Captain Bing Brand Alaska Pink Salmon.” 

One glance and you’ll know that the history of Tenakee Springs is in fishing and canning. It’s a place for those who work on the water to heal their bodies in the bathhouse. The nearby Superior Packing Company closed long ago, but the remnants of that boom time are in the museum.

(Sound of clock chime)

For Wisenbaugh, the crown jewel of the collection is a case of stone tools and a spruce root basket from the Tlingit people who first inhabited this land. She points to a cooking stone. “You can see where the finger holds are. You can see where your hand would fit,” she says with awe in her voice.

The tools were found entirely by locals digging around their own property. This is truly the museum that Tenakee built. Officers and board members privately stored decades of donations from residents. And now, to their great relief, it’s mostly all in one place for the public to enjoy and build upon.

(Sound of rattling keys)

“One of our members brought over this cigar box full of old keys,” Wisenbaugh notes. The box of key is used to fundraise. How it works is you become a member of the museum, pick a key from the box, and hang it on a community board with your name.

“People spend a lot of time picking their key, children especially. And they’ll race in to show other kids,” Wisenbaugh says.  ‘This one’s mine, it’s got my name on it!’ It fascinates me how the kids love this place. Some of them come up with their own ideas of what things are.”

Wisenbaugh is also quick to imagine the lives of the people who used these objects. She’s hard pressed to talk about the what the museum means to her in words, so does it with the collection.

At one point, she gleefully produces a vintage car horn, salvaged from a rotting car on the beach. Kevin Allred, the guy who built the heating system, got it to work again.

(Sound of 20th century car horn)

“I regret it doesn’t do OOO-AHHHH-OOO-AHH, but this is okay,” Wisenbaugh says. She loves the work of putting life back into objects long forgotten. History has an immediacy for her and comes right up close. She has to go soon to pick up her grandson, but not before showing me a letter from Dermot O’Toole, the namesake of the local library. He sent this letter to his mother in 1941.

“‘I happened to be tuning in to the radio at the house when I happened to learn that Japanese planes had bombed Pearl Harbor. For a moment, I thought it was just a hoax or play. Now we have settled down to the grim realization that it is actually a war and by all indications, it is going to be a long one.'”

With the museum open, Wisenbaugh nows wants to catalogue the collection. They’re running out for room to take more donations, but as she put it, “If it has anything to do with Tenakee and a good story behind it, we’ll take it.”