Seward’s Jesse Lee Home fades to nothing with demolition of buildings
Jesse Lee Home’s Jewel Guard Hall in summer 2021
Seward’s Jesse Lee Home For Children passed into history at the end of 2020 when its remaining buildings were demolished.
The first Jesse Lee Home, an orphanage and boarding school for Aleut children, opened at Unalaska in 1890. Operated by the Methodist Women’s Home Missionary Society (WHMS), it was named for a pioneering Methodist circuit-riding minister in New England.
During the early 1920s the WHMS was forced to reconsider the Unalaska home’s future. Transportation and supplies in the Aleutians were expensive; the Unalaska buildings were in need of repair; and the 1919 influenza pandemic had decimated many Aleut villages, filling the children’s home to overflowing.
The pandemic was no kinder to other Alaska Native peoples, and the WHMS-administered Lavinia Wallace Young children’s home in Nome found itself in similar straits, with too many children and not enough resources.
The WHMS decided to combine the two institutions, and cast about for a location that might better serve its needs. It finally settled on Seward, which was a major transportation center and had agricultural potential. (The church hoped to operate a farm at the children’s home.)
National Park Service documents state that in 1923 the federal government deeded 100 acres of land 1½ miles northwest of downtown Seward to the WHMS. Construction of the Jesse Lee Home’s two main buildings, Jewel Guard Hall and Goode Hall, began in 1925.
Both buildings were large 2½-story wood-frame structures. They had shingled, hipped roofs with dormers, and the exterior walls were covered with stucco.
Jewel Guard Hall, which had an H-shaped floor plan, provided space for a shop, classrooms, chapel, staff apartments, library, gymnasium, and boys dormitory. The T-shaped Goode Hall housed the home’s administrative offices and the girls dormitory.
According to Jacquelin Pels’ history of Seward’s Jesse Lee Home, Jewel Guard Hall was completed by the fall of 1925, and children from Unalaska and Nome began arriving in October of that year. Goode Hall was completed in 1926.
Over the next decade several additional buildings were constructed in the home’s core area, including the two-story Balto Building, which housed a dining facility, staff quarters and classrooms. A sawmill was constructed about a mile away, and buildings were constructed to support the home’s farm, including a barn, silo, and associated out-buildings. Staff and older students also constructed a small hydro-electric dam on the mountain above the children’s home
From 1925 to 1942 the Jesse Lee Home fostered about 120 children each year. The children’s home was evacuated and closed for several years during World War II, but re-opened in 1946. After World War II the home only fostered about 30 children per year.
The 1964 Good Friday Earthquake ravaged Seward’s waterfront and caused extensive damage elsewhere around town, including the Jesse Lee Home. Goode Hall was severely damaged and other facilities at the children’s home required major repairs. By that time the State of Alaska was moving away from orphanages towards smaller group-homes and foster-parenting, and the WHMS decided to move its operations to Anchorage rather than rebuild the Seward facility. It permanently closed the home and deeded the property to the City of Seward in 1966. It had sat vacant since then.
The city subdivided and developed the land around the home’s buildings. Goode Hall was demolished in 1972. Jewel Guard Hall and the Balto Building, sitting on 2.65 acres, were retained by the city and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995.
Despite efforts by the nonprofit group Friends of the Jesse Lee Home to save the buildings, the city of Seward determined the buildings were unsafe. It began demolition of the buildings in November, 2020. completing the job in early 2021. The City of Seward has rezoned the land as a park, and plans to erect a memorial there to the now-gone children’s home.
Sources:
- “Council approves Jesse Lee Home rezoning.” Sam McDavid. In “Seward Journal.” 1-13-2021
- “Family After All, Alaska’s Jesse Lee Home, Volume II {Seward, 1925-1965}” Jacquelin P. Pels. Hardscratch Press. 2008
- “Jesse Lee Home for Children, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form.” Timothy Sczawinski. National Park Service. 1995
- “Survey asks about vision for Jesse Lee Home property.” KINY Radio, www.kinyradio.com. 11-11-2020
- “The Jesse Lee Home for Children.” From the Seward Historic Preservation Commission website, www.cityofseward.net/hpc/historic_properties/index.html, no date
