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The signature artwork chosen for the 2024 Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival was created by someone who has spent years exploring Alaska. Ray Bonnell is a longtime local artist, who is
So who was this Riddiford, and why did this name hold such sway at the site of Joseph Cooper’s boat landing for more than a decade?
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Place names can be ephemeral. And they can fade for myriad reasons. Sometimes offensive names are replaced by more appropriate appellations, as in the case of Dillingham’s Squaw Creek recently being given the Yup’ik name Amau Creek. Sometimes names disappear, such as when the planned community of Gruening, named for Alaska’s U.S. Senator Ernest Gruening, was a Nikiski-area dream that never quite came true. This is the story of Riddiford, which was the name of the community at the outlet at Kenai Lake — until it suddenly no longer was.
Author and artist Ray Bonnell will sign copies of his latest book “Interior Sketches III” at the North Pole Grange Gallery from 5-8 tonight.
Last year, Ray Bonnell ended his long-running “Sketches of Alaska” column in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, which featured drawings of buildings and other human-constructed items around the state coupled with