October 9, 2025 Seward Folly

The event is “Share Our History” and Resurrection Bay Historical Society invites the community to stop by the Seward Community Library & Museum on Thursday, Oct. 16, and Saturday, Oct. 18, to browse and shop for treasures. Everything will be free, with a donation jar on hand.

Items are either duplicates from the historical society collection or objects that do not meet the organization’s mission, which is to preserve materials that illustrate the history of the Seward area.

Tables and racks will be set up in the Community Room, allowing people to look through vintage clothing and accessories, nautical charts, photos, art, display cases, chairs and much more. First come, first serve. Please bring bags and/or boxes to take items home with you. The event will be held from 7 to 8 p.m. Oct. 16 and 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. Oct. 18.

When the historical society (RBHS for short) opened the doors to the town’s first museum in 1966, it was filled with items that told the history of not only Seward but other areas throughout Alaska. Some donations came from people who had to move out of town after the 1964 earthquake and didn’t want their treasures to leave the area.

Over the years, as the museum outgrew its first location in the basement of City Hall and then moved to a second site at the corner of Third and Jefferson, it became apparent that our scope of collections would have to exclude items from outside our geographic area. In fact, when two dozen volunteers packed up museum objects to move into the current building on Sixth Avenue in 2012, it was a tight fit to relocate our collection.

At the time, the museum collection included a backlog of nearly 100 boxes of material awaiting processing. The RBHS Collections Committee members tackled this task in recent years and selected hundreds of items to catalog. But what to do with materials that don’t meet our mission? It’s been challenging to decide how to disperse this material. Cooper Landing Historical Museum’s “Treasure Sale” seemed to be a good model to follow. Cooper Landing’s museum offers items back to community members and we want to do the same here in Seward! But materials will be free to all.

To view some of the featured items in the Share Our History event, visit
http://www.resbayhistorical.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Share-Our-History_object-photos.pdf

Photo caption:
Just a few of the items that Resurrection Bay Historical Society is offering free to community members at the Share Our History event on Oct. 16 and 18 are a diver’s
helmet, movie camera, framed Statehood stamp artwork, hand-tooled leather purse,
Russian doll, telephone ringer and century-old drapes.