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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

AUTHOR’S NOTE: By the first of August 1948, Larry and Rusty Lancashire and their three daughters (Martha, Lori and Abby) were well under way in building a new and independent life on their homestead on Pickle Hill. Living in a wall tent not far from the new Kenai Spur Road, they were erecting a sawmill and a cabin farther back in the woods. They had hand-dug a water well and were awaiting a pump.

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.