Cabin at core of UAF history

By Tori Tragis, University Relations
March 2006

The Rainey-Skarland cabin is old and drafty, but Jenny Newton is clearly smitten with the place she has called home since last fall. "It's a proper log cabin with moss chinking," she says happily. "It's beautifully designed, and it has such a nice atmosphere."

Trying to pinpoint a favorite feature quickly becomes an exercise in cataloging the 70-year-old cabin's every detail. She shows off the basement with the faded dinosaur cartoons on the walls, a memento from a past art student; the kitchen and bedroom, which lie a few steps lower than the other half of the house; and the large stone fireplace in the middle of the living room, open on two sides to distribute the heat.

"I like the old furniture, and I love the fact that there were so many bookshelves built in, and the big heavy doors, and the deep honey color of the logs," Newton says. "The firelight makes them glow."

Newton, a Ph.D. student in anthropology, feels keenly the history that surrounds her.

"There's this long line of archaeologists and historians who have lived here," she says. "You can almost feel the contributions they made to the knowledge of arctic prehistory."

The cabin's original owner, Froelich Rainey, and former cabin resident Helge Larsen were the focus of Newton's work towards her master's degree, which she received from UAF in 2002. For her thesis, she investigated the original work done by Rainey and Larsen at Ipiutak, near Point Hope in western Alaska in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Using modern technology, Newton re-examined the pair's work nearly 70 years later.

Newton has a special fondness for Larsen. He had, she notes, a rather significant challenge to overcome to continue his Alaska research. The Danish archaeologist was held up in Nazi-occupied Denmark during a visit home in 1940. He escaped with his family and came back to Alaska in 1941 where he continued his partnership with Rainey in discovering the Ipiutak site.

For her doctoral degree Newton is studying how changes in climate and environment affected past cultures in the Arctic. Although she may incorporate some of her Ipiutak work in this new research, it will no longer be at the center of her intellectual life. It is a pattern the peripatetic Rainey would recognize: gathering and building on old knowledge in pursuit of new knowledge.

Newton is also literally moving on. As the late winter days grow ever longer, her time in the Rainey-Skarland cabin grows shorter. She will probably move to new quarters next year, to give another anthropologist an opportunity to immerse him or herself in a little piece of history that hasn't quite been forgotten.

The cabin's history

The simple, one-story structure is a relic of an early chapter in Fairbanks' history, when the community of College was separate from the larger town of Fairbanks and the university was very much on the outskirts of both. It was 1936 and Rainey and his wife, Penelope, had just arrived in the Interior to create the university's first Department of Anthropology.

Lacking a place to live, the Raineys sought permission from the University of Alaska Board of Regents to build a private home on campus. The regents agreed, stipulating that the university be offered purchase rights should the Raineys sell.

The pair sketched the design on a scrap of paper and handed it to contractor T.S. Batchelder before heading out for a summer of field research. They returned to a simple three-room log cabin with a massive stone fireplace, windows on every side--and no insulation to keep out the quickly deepening cold of a Fairbanks fall. The contractor had neglected to chink the spaces between the logs.

No matter. The couple moved into the cabin, filling the cracks with moss that grew abundantly in the black spruce forests just beyond the cabin. Rainey began to create an anthropology department that would become known throughout the North, further bolstering the university's claim as a leader in arctic studies.

The cabin came to form the very heart of the anthropology department, and for some years, even the heart of the university.

A veritable who's who in arctic anthropology has lived in or visited the old cabin. While the Raineys still lived there, Larsen and his family slept on the floor until they found accommodations of their own. Frederica de Laguna, Henry Collins and Otto Geist all spent time there. After the Raineys sold the cabin to the university in 1942, pioneer arctic archaeologist J. Louis Giddings lived there for several years, as did Ivar Skarland, a former student of Rainey's who became head of the anthropology department.

It was Ivar Skarland's gregarious good humor that gave the building its second name: "Skarland's cabin." The outgoing Norwegian and champion skier, who lived there for 15 years, was renowned for his Fourth of July parties and the reliability of a welcoming fire for chilled skiers.

That sense of community was built into the cabin. The board of regents in 1936 was wary of creating a private domain on the campus of a public university. Instead, the regents believed it should contribute to the social and academic life of the institution, especially that of the anthropology department. After all, it was the first head of the department who was responsible for the cabin's construction in the first place.

"The idea is for the cabin to be used primarily as a residence but open occasionally for department functions like potlucks and open houses," explains Associate Professor of Anthropology David Koester. He lived in the cabin for two and a half years."

The person who's living there has to be willing to be part of the public face. That goes with the territory," he says. "The point of historical preservation is that these buildings should be used as residences to keep them alive."

Garden restoration project: back to the original

Koester is troubled by the way the cabin has been lost amid the modern structures that crowd around it, but he's hopeful that projects planned by anthropology faculty will help restore some of the cabin's original rural atmosphere. The first step toward preserving the integrity and history of the cabin is a project to restore the garden.

Craig Gerlach, associate professor of anthropology, has proposed re-establishing the cabin's garden as it would have been in its heyday.

"The Rainey-Skarland garden would be two things," Gerlach explains. "It would be an effort to restore the garden to the extent we can, and it would be a place tourists could visit and see what's going on."

Gerlach plans to make the restored garden as authentic as possible.

"I don't want to just grow seeds. I want to do what we can to restore it as closely as possible to what the Raineys used in that garden. I talk about restoring it with 'period vegetables,' and ornamentals, too. We have documents to go on, letters and journal accounts."

Gerlach notes that the Interior's poor soil made farming difficult for early Fairbanksans, and he says not much is known about how crops were grown in sufficient quantities. The proposed garden, tentatively scheduled for its first planting in summer 2007, could offer insight into those early agricultural challenges.

As one of the earliest university buildings on campus still standing, the Rainey-Skarland cabin is both historically important in itself and for its role in the early years of the university. Few articulate that significance more forcefully than Koester.

"The cabin is important to the history of northern scholarship," he stresses. Koester cites Michael Krauss, emeritus professor of linguistics who has been researching the university's history. Krauss observed that during the time people like Rainey and Giddings lived on campus, UAF was most well known for its contributions to the understanding of Eskimo-Inuit prehistory and ethnology.

"We weren't famous for the Geophysical Institute and space science on West Ridge; it was the university's work in anthropology," Koester says.

"That's why the cabin is so important to the university; it's part of the history of our prominence in arctic and northern research. The Rainey cabin is at the core of that history."

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For more information, please contact:

• Tori Tragis, writer, University Relations, University of Alaska Fairbanks (907) 474-6438, tori.tragis@uaf.edu.

Other useful links:

• The National Register of Historic Places
• Fairbanks History
• David Koester's Rainey Cabin web page

Ipiutak Culture:

• Tikigaq Corporation
• American Museum of Natural History Rainey-Larsen Point Hope Expedition
• The National Park Service Prehistory of Alaska
• Erosion Jeopardizes Homes, Artifacts in Alaska

UAF photos by Todd Paris.