Pacific High, Part 2
Dear Editor: What did I learn the last couple of weeks when I was futzing around in the dirt, mud and snow during the demolition of the old Pacific High and the preparation of the ground for the new Pacific High? Well, I learned that I didn’t know I didn’t know. I mean, I really had no idea what used to be on that Sitka School District property on the corner of Baranof and Lincoln. But I didn’t know I didn’t know. Now I know I didn’t know. Anything. It was humbling.
For example, brick kept showing up. Lots and lots of brick. Brick loose in the dirt, Brick embedded in cement walls. Big pieces. Little pieces. Hunks here and hunks there. What kind of red baked stuff was it? Was it Russian? Or from Finland? Was it recycled in 1926 when the Territorial school was built? Might it have been a part of the huge Russian Hospital built on that property sometime in the early 1840s?
What? You didn’t know about the Russian hospital? Well, I didn’t either. But just in case it is old, I saved a bunch of brick, tossing it out of the mounds of rearranged dirt and I stored what I could under a platform by the construction trailer. Maybe Ty Dillipane, a Russian American scholar, will visit Sitka again sometime. Maybe someone in Sitka knows where it came from. Maybe that brick came from many sources over many decades. We Sitkans love to recycle, you know.
Might that brick be recycled artistically? Or broken into bits and sold for big bucks as a real piece of Sitka history, even if we don’t know exactly where it came from? It still IS Sitkan. Rebury the chunks and charge for “discovering” and keeping an itty bit of Sitka. If it can be validated that it really is of Russian origin, then up the price.
SEDA has been looking for new small businesses. How about a great big sand, mud and pebble box, salted with bits and pieces of artifacts from Sitka’s past.
Sprinkle in a bit of the gorgeous blue and white ceramic shards found, perhaps already recycled, and sometimes newly fragmented by bulldozers and excavators. Pretty close to the beautifully restored National Park Service “School House.”
No, I didn’t know when that building was built either, but the sign is right there: Built in 1897. Can you believe I had never stopped to read that sign until last week! It was a run-down tenement house when I went to the Territorial school, next door. Thousands of artifacts were found when the National Park Service restored the Old School House, and scholars documented many, including what was found in a 7-foot trash pit full of interesting items.
On the Sitka school property, I found pieces of blue and white ceramic shards together, burned, flaked by heat, 18 inches deep right under where the old Russian hospital burned on Jan. 24, 1882.
What, you didn’t know about that? Well, I didn’t either. That old dilapidated wooden hospital burned down when it was occupied by school boys and Miss Austin. A story for another time. A startling surprise in lots of ways. An early chapter in western education in Sitka.
But, let’s remember, friends, that lots of education occurred along these shared shores long, long ago, before the written history we draw on now. Like bits and pieces of precious, crushed porcelain, fragments of our shared history emerges while a new center of education is built right there on the corner of Baranof and Lincoln.
I haven’t found my marbles. But a lot of other puzzling stuff has surfaced.
Nancy Yaw Davis, Sitka
