Pickle Hill News Today

The roads were lifelines between communities and among neighbors

Ridgeway homesteader Larry Lancashire was reminded of the value of such friendship in December 1950 when he shot another illegal moose

In the earliest days of the Sterling Highway and the adjoining Kenai Spur, the roads were lifelines between communities and among neighbors

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Most of the people who came to homestead and stayed long term on the central Kenai Peninsula created a circle of friends and acquaintances and found ways to contribute to the greater society around them. This was true of Larry and Rusty Lancashire, who came to make themselves a home on Pickle Hill in Ridgeway in 1948. In almost no time at all, they were integrating themselves into their newfound community.

Rusty and the three Lancashire daughters arrived in Kenai on June 19

Larry Lancashire’s status as a military veteran would aid him in his homesteading efforts on the Kenai Peninsula

AUTHOR’S NOTE: By March 1948, a month before his 30th birthday, Larry Lancashire had already experienced an eventful adulthood. He had flown numerous missions as a bomber pilot in World War II, had been shot down by Axis forces and captured as a prisoner of war, had married his sweetheart Rusty and produced three young daughters, and had driven — with the company of only Tuto, his springer spaniel — from Ohio to Alaska to begin building a home and a life for his family.

Mrs. Lancashire certainly didn’t fit Lee’s notion of what a homesteading woman should look like.

Author’s note: In 1939, Rusty Tallman, an Illinois woman who had done some modeling and loved parties, married Larry Lancashire, an Ohio man who enjoyed the outdoors and eschewed the high society into which he had been born. Four years later, he was part of a bomber crew in World War II.

In the summer of 1948, while Soldotna homesteader Howard Lee was helping Ridgeway homesteader Larry Lancashire build a cabin, he got his first glimpse of Larry’s wife, Rusty: “She was right off Madison Avenue, so to speak,” said Lee in a 1991 interview, “in her natty suit, silk stockings, high heels, etc.”