Menu
- Home
- Search▼
- List▼
- Add▼
- My Relate▼
- Admin▼
ViewsWatchers |
Nanwalek (‘place by lagoon’; ), formerly Alexandrovsk and later English Bay, is a census-designated place (CDP) in the Kenai Peninsula Borough, Alaska, United States, that contains a traditional Alutiiq village. The population was 254 at the 2010 census, up from 177 in 2000. There is one school located in the community, attended by 76 students. Subsistence activities are a large part of the culture for indigenous people, and Nanwalek is no exception, especially when it comes to salmon and seal harvesting. The sale of alcohol is banned in the village, although importing and possession are allowed. [edit] History
A Russian fortress called Aleksandrovsk, the first Russian post on mainland Alaska, was established at the present site of Nanwalek by men of Grigorii Shelikhov’s company in 1786, while Shelikhov himself was still on Kodiak Island. In 1793, men from the company of the rivalling Pavel Lebedev-Lastochkin, who had in the meantime established themselves around the modern city of Kenai, attacked with 60 men the Aleksandrovsk fortress, accompanied by Dena'ina warriors. Lebedev-Lastochkin’s men organized various provocations and beat the local Natives, took from them furs that would have been sent to Shelikhov’s men in Kodiak, but ultimately they could not capture the fort. In the summer of 1794, the fortress was moved to a new, higher place, since the old structures had rotted and had begun to collapse as a result of high tides. At this time, the head of the fortress was V. I. Malakhov. This seems to indicate that the first fortress had been located on the Nanwalek spit. In 1798, when the Dena'ina Indians rose against the men of Lebedev-Lastochkin’s company in Kenai, Tyonek and Old Iliamna, the timely arrival of a detachment from Aleksandrovsk, led by V. I. Malakhov, saved the Kenai colony from total destruction. The Tyonek and Iliamna colonies, however, were destroyed. By 1818, the fortress in Nanwalek was closed down, and possibly the colony since then existed as an odinochka, or ‘one man post’, although this is not certain. The fortress was transferred at this time to Nushagak, where it was known as the Novo-Aleksandrovskii fortress (‘New Aleksandrovskii fortress’). [edit] Research Tips
|
||||||||||||||
