Editor’s note: This is the third of a three-part story about Don Culver, the first settler on Longmere Lake. Part one examined the route taken by Culver to establish a presence on the lake. Part two focused on an important friendship begun at the lake and on Culver’s attempt to create a new home. This week’s final installment looks at his first years on Longmere with his growing family. To read parts one and two, visit our website, http://www.redoubtreporter.wordpress.com.
By Clark Fair
Photos courtesy of Don Culver. Don Culver stands at the public-access launch on Longmere Lake in 2000, which once was a portion of the homestead property he claimed in 1947.
Redoubt Reporter
In 2011, the drive from the eastern edge of Cooper Landing to Longmere Lake is somewhat less than 45 miles on a firm bed of two-lane, lined blacktop. Despite the reduced-speed areas through Cooper Landing and Sterling, it is not uncommon for a driver to make this journey in an hour or less.
Consequently, it may be difficult for modern drivers to comprehend how it managed to take 21-year-old Don Culver five days to drive that distance in the spring of 1948.
“I went down as soon as the road was clear,” Culver said. “I had bought a (military) surplus truck and barged it across from Anchorage over to the little town of Hope and then down the old forest road from there to Henton’s Lodge. I could get as far as Cooper’s Landing on the forest road, and that’s where the new road was to start. It was just a Cat trail then, but I had a 4-by-4 weapons carrier and all my gear for the year, a couple, three drums of fuel, and things like that.”
And thus loaded down in breakup conditions, the truck sank easily in the soft, exposed soil.
“I required two or three assists from Road Commission tractors that were working in the neighborhood to get me out of mud holes, or (had to do it) myself by digging and then corduroying through and around swamps and things,” he said. “I would go and get stuck and have to dig out, and cut wood to fill the holes and make a little corduroy patch to get on to the next place with the four-wheel drive. It did not have a winch, but it was a pretty good rig to drive around.”
This photo of Don Culver's truck parked (near Longmere Lake) on the Sterling Highway was probably taken in 1949. Culver shot this photo looking westward down the road toward Mount Redoubt on the horizon.
”Virtually every bog or mud hole required either assistance or hours of toil and sweat, and the bogs and mud holes were plentiful. Eventually, Culver arrived at the lake, along the northwestern shore of which stood a nearly complete 16-by-20-foot log home in a stand of mostly mixed birch and aspen.
When he had begun his building project the previous summer, he had been the first and the only owner of private property on the lake. Now he was one of three.
In the fall of 1947, Lyle Edgington, Bob Murray and Carl Weber had flown in and staked homesteads. In November, about the time that Culver had packed up
his equipment and returned to Anchorage for the winter, the three friends — along with a German short-haired pointer that had been given to them by a Yellow Cab driver in Anchorage — had returned, erected a wall tent on Edgington’s homestead, and set to work building a small, rough cabin.
They built with logs cut from trees on the property and made the floor and roof with lumber trucked overland from Seward. It was cold enough during the construction process that they kept a fire burning nearby throughout the day, and the dog sat by the fire all day while the men worked. At night in the tent, they wrapped the animal in a big Army overcoat to keep him warm.
They hadn’t been working long, however, when Weber decided to give up on homesteading and headed to Seward to become a longshoreman.
“Weber, he couldn’t get along with Bob Murray,” Edgington said. “I could see his point, too. He (Murray) was a screwball son of a b—- as far as I was concerned. I had to keep them apart most of the time. They were always arguing and quarreling.”
By early January 1948, Edgington and Murray had a livable structure with a small wood stove, and they struggled against the elements as the coldest part of
Don Culver entered the winter of 1948 with his homestead cabin complete. The darker bottom logs are aspen cut in early spring. The vertical stockade-style wall logs are also aspen, but cut later in the summer. The rafters, purlins, roof beam and gable ends are all fashioned from spruce.
winter set in. When Culver returned that spring, he had two new neighbors, but both men soon went to work for the summer — Murray at the Libby McNeil & Libby cannery on the lower Kenai River, and Edgington back to Anchorage to see what he could find. Both returned to their homesteads whenever they were able.
Meanwhile, Culver continued to work on his land. He cleared and sowed about two acres to meet homesteading standards. He finished chinking his cabin walls and made the place livable. He cut, split and stacked cords of firewood. He built a dock down at the lake.
He also walked or drove his truck into Soldotna nearly every week, visiting and staying with his friends, Frank and Marge Mullen.
Often, he said, he would fish for salmon in the Soldotna area, but occasionally he would walk the length of Longmere Lake and travel through the woods south to the middle river to wet his line.
On one such excursion, he returned to his cabin to discover that a well-known drinker from Kenai had stopped by his place, consumed some of his food and divested Culver of his small supply of booze.
“He left me a note that he’d had supper and drank my brandy — I had a small bottle there to have on hand and wasn’t drinking it at all — but he drank that all up and left a note saying he’d come back one day and replace it, and of course he never did,” Culver said.
Generally, however, life on the lake was sedate and seldom interrupted. When winter arrived, Culver packed up and returned to Anchorage once more, working at Merrill Field sometimes, and other times for the ARC.
That same year, Culver began a relationship with Dolores “Dee” Mulqueen, and in 1950 they married in the Catholic church in downtown Anchorage. The
Don Culver became a commercial pilot for Alaska Airlines in 1956. Here, in 1967, he poses in front of a four-engine turboprop Hercules aircraft.
Mullens were on hand for the ceremony and for the reception a few blocks down the street at Club 25, a dining establishment on Fourth Avenue.
Around this same time, Culver began a new job as a mechanic for Alaska Airlines, and his subsequent transfer to Bethel for the next two years took him away from Longmere and his peninsula friends for most of each year.
In 1953, Culver began doing his mechanical work out of Anchorage International Airport, and he was building steadily toward a commercial pilot’s license. Often, particularly in the summer months, Dee and their children would stay in the Longmere cabin, and Don would join them on the weekends. The kids — the Culvers would eventually have one son and four daughters — loved the time on the homestead, fishing, boating, swimming, playing, gathering water, listening to the loons and watching what their father called “sea smoke” form over the water.
At times, Culver, who still sings every Sunday in his church choir in Seattle, would fill the cabin with music.
“I can remember as a little kid at the cabin, he’d play the harmonica and just kind of quietly sing along,” said Terri Culver, the eldest daughter. Even now, she said, hearing him sing transports her back across the years. “It makes you a little kid again, definitely just makes you sit back and remember home.”
In 1956, Culver achieved his dream job as a commercial pilot, flying DC-3s for Alaska Airlines out of Anchorage, but by the end of 1957 he was faced with a difficult choice: transfer to Seattle and remain a pilot, or stay in Alaska and look for another job. In 1958, the Culvers moved to Washington state, where Don would conclude a 37-year career with the airlines with his retirement in 1987.
Of the Culver children, only the oldest, Marc, still lives in Alaska. The daughters live in Washington and California. Dee passed away in 2005, and Don lives on a sailboat in Seattle and spends most of his spare time restoring old aircraft.
The Culvers had surveyed their lake property into sections and sold the first piece in about 1980, holding onto the final piece until 1998. Even all the way from
Dee and Don Culver pose in the early 1950s with their first children, Terri and Marc, in their homestead cabin on Longmere Lake.
Washington, Culver said, he felt some pain in letting go.
“It’s just circumstances and family needs and choices that took me right from it,” Culver said. “I wish I had it still. I just have great, fond memories of it. That’s where I enjoyed visiting. And having a bit of Alaska reminded me of where my adult life started.”
Before Culver sold the cabin property, the cabin itself was used periodically by squatters and sometimes, by arrangement, by Boy Scouts or campers from the Catholic Church. Over the course of time, it began to become rundown and ramshackled. Today, a new house sits where the cabin once stood. After he sold his homesite, the new owners bulldozed the old cabin and started fresh.
When he visited Longmere about 10 years ago, he said he felt “amazement” at the growth he saw. “People had built nice houses and roads, and I had my name on one of them, and I felt a little bit of pride in having started that and having been one of the early folks in the country. But also there was the realization that I wished I hadn’t sold it all. So that combined a little sadness with not being a part of it anymore.
“But having achieved several years in my life, well, you’ve got to be philosophical about some stuff, and you make choices and you live with them.”
The loons still visit Longmere Lake each summer, but they’ve got a lot more company these days.
The Mouth of The Kenai 