Seldovia is a community on the eastern shore of Seldovia Bay and the southern shore of Kachemak Bay in Cook Inlet, about 136 miles (219 km) south-west of Anchorage and 15 miles (24 km) south-west of Homer, Alaska. The name derives from the Russian word for “herring” and first appears on charts referring to Seldevoi Point, attributed to Captain Illarion Archimandritov, whom Mikhail D. Tebenkov sent to survey Cook Inlet from 1848 to 1850 for the Russian-American Company. Russian charts called the bay Chesloknu Bay. Since 1909 the US Coast and Geodetic Survey has referred to the point, bay and village as “Seldovia”. The Border Ranges Fault cuts across the bay entrance, separating rocks of the Chugach-Prince William composite terrane to the east from the Peninsular terrane west of Point Naskowhak. Most of the bay consists of rocks from the McHugh Complex, which forms a continuous strike belt from Seldovia to Valdez and constitutes an older part of the Chugach-Prince William terrane that developed from the Permian to the Late Cretaceous period. The rocks are mostly boulder and cobble conglomerate, graywacke, and argillite with elongated slices of chert and basalt.

The archaeological record suggests humans lived in Kachemak Bay from about 3,000 years ago, when an ancient maritime culture established camps and settlements. These people abandoned the bay for unknown reasons about 1,000 years ago. After several hundred years, Athabaskan people from the Alaskan interior arrived; their descendants are the historical Dena’ina. Russians arrived in the mid-1700s for the maritime fur trade and coal mining, marking the beginning of the European presence. In 1820 a Russian Orthodox church was built at Seldovia from drift logs brought from the beach. In 1869, shortly after the Alaska Purchase, a trading post was established. In 1880 the first census of Seldovia Bay by Ivan Petrof reported 68 Alutiiq people and three of mixed ethnicity. These may have been former employees of the Russian-American Company allowed to retire there, similar to the retirement community at Ninilchik. In 1891 the Russian Orthodox church was rebuilt and named after Saint Nicholas. The church’s influence may have affected the community’s ethnic composition, because various sources report inhabitants to be Alutiiq, Dena’ina Athabaskan, Aleut and Chugach.

By the late 1800s Seldovia was politically and economically significant as the only ice-free port in Cook Inlet and became one of Alaska’s largest cities. The local economy was based largely on fur trapping, timber and fish processing. In 1898 the first post office officially named the community Seldovia. In the early 1900s Seldovia became an important gold-rush port. Small vessels of the Cook Inlet Transportation Company met ocean-going steamships at Seldovia that carried men, livestock and freight to other settlements in upper Cook Inlet. Scandinavians developed the herring fishery; two on-shore herring salteries were built in Seldovia, and old sailing ships served as floating salteries. When herring stocks were depleted, the commercial salmon fishery expanded and the need for labor brought many immigrant workers; the town’s population grew to over 2,000 residents. Seldovia fishermen also experimented with catching and processing king, Dungeness, and tanner crab in the 1920s and 1930s. Seldovia’s role as a transfer port declined after the railroad from Seward to Fairbanks was completed in 1923 and with the development of a road system and deep-water port in Anchorage. Today the town is still not connected to the road system but is a stop for Alaska Marine Highway ferries; otherwise, access is only by air or water taxi. Read more here and here. Explore more of Seldovia and Kachemak Bay here: