In 1915 Lomen & Company built a reindeer meatpacking plant on Golovnin Bay, roughly 20 miles (32 km) southwest of Elim and 7.8 miles (12.5 km) southeast of Golovin, Alaska. The abandoned buildings are at the mouth of an unnamed creek draining the western flank of the Kwiktalik Mountains, about 1 mile (1.6 km) north-northeast of Carolyn Island and 2 miles (3.2 km) north-northwest of the historical Golovnin Mission. The Mission Covenant of Sweden first settled at Unalakleet in 1887, and in 1893 a separate outpost was built at the mouth of Cheenik Creek on Golovnin Bay by missionary August Andersson, who was later joined by Nels O. Hultberg. A separate mission and reindeer station known as the Golovnin Mission was built about 8 miles (13 km) southeast of Cheenik near Carolyn Island where a post office opened in 1899. The mission reindeer station closed in 1904 after a storm caused severe damage and it was relocated to Elim. The post office closed in 1906 and reopened at the present-day village of Golovin in 1908.

Alaska’s reindeer industry began in the early 1890s as a modest effort, led by missionary and federal education agent Sheldon Jackson, to import small herds from Siberia and give Alaska Natives a new source of food and income. The program, modeled on reindeer herding in Scandinavian Lapland, was overseen by the federal Bureau of Education. Though the animals were meant to build up Native-owned herds, the first private owner was in fact the non-Native Congregational mission at Wales. After 1898, Sami (“Lapp”) herders hired to teach herding techniques were paid in reindeer rather than cash; when their contracts expired in 1901, many began building private herds of their own. Large-scale non-Native ownership arrived in 1914, when brothers Carl and Alfred Lomen launched Lomen & Company in Nome. In 1915 the firm bought the mission herds at Teller and Golovin, and between 1920 and 1929 it added slaughterhouses and cold-storage plants at Nome, Egavik, Elephant Point and Golovnin Bay..

By the late 1920s an estimated 400,000 reindeer grazed western Alaska, part of a boom that pushed the total herd to roughly 600,000-640,000 animals by the early 1930s. Demand for reindeer meat then fell as mining on the Seward Peninsula declined, the Great Depression set in, and U.S. cattle producers lobbied against the competition. On September 1, 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Reindeer Act, formally the Reindeer Industry Act of 1937, ending years of dispute by authorizing the secretary of the interior to buy out non-Native herd owners and bar future non-Native ownership. Administration of Alaska’s reindeer herds passed to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and non-Natives were shut out of the industry until a 1997 federal court decision reopened it to them. Read more here and here. Explore more of Lomen & Company and Golovnin Bay here: