‘What’s in a name?’: Reviving a forgotten past — Part 2

Published 1:30 am Thursday, February 19, 2026

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Place names can be ephemeral and can fade for myriad reasons. Sometimes offensive names are replaced by more appropriate appellations. Sometimes names are forgotten over time, or they 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 the community at the outlet at Kenai Lake and the name changes that have occurred there since the late 1800s.

In her home in Cooper Landing, area historian Mona Painter reached up to a backroom bookshelf and extracted a thick, white three-ring binder with a single word written on its spine in black magic marker: “Towle.”

Towle, pronounced “toll” as in “toll booth,” is a locally famous and historically important family surname. Painter had collected much of the binder’s contents through a long association with members of that family, particularly Patricia Elizabeth Towle, daughter of Frank and Hazel. Frank was one of seven sons of Lydia and George Towle, a big-time California cattleman who first came to Alaska in 1896.

As Painter handed over the binder to an eager fellow historian, she spoke of the tremendous volume of historical detail to be discovered within and also cautioned that any stories about Pat Towle’s family, especially concerning her father, should be consumed with caution. In fact, those father-centered details should be double- or triple-checked whenever possible, she said.

According to an account written by Patricia Towle, her grandfather George came to Alaska “hunting for gold by way of a map an old fellow had drawn up” for him. The “old fellow,” wrote Patricia, “had been to Alaska prospecting prior to 1896” and had “found these two creeks, not named at this time…. [He] had built a flume on [the] left side of what is now known as Stetson Creek, above Cooper Creek, and found lots of gold.”

Then, she continued, the weather had turned cold and “this old fellow left for [his home in] California. He never told anyone of the gold, except George Towle.” The mapmaker told Towle that he considered himself too old to return to the rugged environs of the Kenai Peninsula; besides, he had mining claims in California to work.

While it is certainly possible that this part of the story—an old, anonymous miner providing a sort of “treasure map”—is true, it is also possible that this was mere family lore, a story passed down to and believed by an impressionable grandchild.

What is more certain is this: George Towle, along with sons Tom and Ben, traveled north with a crew of men and some mining equipment. They arrived by ship at the gold-rush town of Sunrise in the summer of 1896 and then ventured across country, likely via a route known today as the Resurrection Pass Trail, and found themselves on the north bank of the Kenai River just below its Kenai Lake outlet.

There was no settlement there at the time. There were no roads in the area, and no bridges.

The Towle crew halted near a clear stream that they named Bean Creek because, said Patricia, by this point the men “had mostly [just] beans to eat.” They built a cache near the creek and stayed there a few days—whipsawing some lumber and strategizing—before crossing the river and dubbing their crossing “Towle’s Landing.” They then made their way downstream to the mouth of the gold-bearing stream designated on their map and began prospecting.

They found promising color and may have spent a number of weeks prospecting, but the approach of winter eventually prompted them to return to California and marshal their resources for a bigger operation the following year.

Unfortunately, because of cattle-ranching obligations, they were unable to return to the Kenai until 1898. In the two years they had been gone, wrote Patricia Towle, a man named Joseph Cooper had come in and renamed Towle’s Landing after himself. He had also taken over the Towle buildings and used them for his own mining efforts before departing.

Instead of the Towle “stamp” on the area, she said, nearly everything seemed to be named for Cooper, including the gold-bearing stream, plus a lake and a mountain. Patricia Towle found all the attention on Cooper unfair to her family.

Patricia grew up in Cooper’s Landing. Her uncle, Tom Towle, had lived for many years in the area, and her own parents were far more integrated into the community than any members of the Cooper clan. She disliked the sense that the Towles’ contributions to local history seemed relegated to, at best, second fiddle.

However, Patricia Towle did not have all her facts straight.

To begin with, Joseph M. Cooper had preceded George Towle to the area by more than a decade. Cooper is believed to have traveled from San Francisco via steamship and landed at the Homer Spit in about 1882. By at least 1884, he had made his way up the Kenai River to the outlet of Kenai Lake.

Although he did discover gold in the area and may have established a trading post near the lake outlet, he stayed only a short time. He returned to the southern peninsula, married a Ninilchik native named Elizabeth “Lizzie” Kvasnikoff in 1888, and produced several children before dying of pneumonia near Anchor Point in 1899.

However, in the spring of 1896, three years before he died and almost certainly before the arrival of the Towles, Cooper gathered a group of miners (the Cooper Mining & Prospecting Association) and returned to the lake and to the same gold-bearing stream, which by that time was already being referred to as Cooper Creek.

Again, he stayed only a short time—about two months—but it was long enough for him to help found the Lake Mining District and for the other miners to name him its chairman. By 1898, according Donald J. Orth’s Dictionary of Alaska Place Names, the U.S. Geological Survey reported the names Cooper Creek and Cooper Lake.

Patricia Towle wrote: “George Towle found Cooper’s name on all of his buildings at Cooper Landing and Cooper Creek.” She lamented what she perceived as a lost heritage, but she was likely misinformed.

George Towle “took sick” in the late summer of 1898, wrote Patricia, and “had to be taken back to California.” He never returned to Alaska. According to ancestry.com data compiled by a member of the Towle family, George died in March 1904 in Pacific Grove, California. Meanwhile, even after Joseph Cooper’s death five years earlier, his family stayed on the Kenai, and members of his extended clan still live there today.

These days in Cooper Landing, the Towle name has been relegated to a single road in town, Towle Circle, which leads up from the Sterling Highway to Patricia Lane.

Postscript

In addition to coining Bean Creek—a name that stuck and is still used today—Patricia Towle’s family claims two more names with staying power and one name without. In a July 5, 1957, article entitled “Before Seward Was Born,” in Seward’s Petticoat Gazette, Patricia’s father, Frank Towle included those names and some details of their origins.

The first surviving name is Surprise Creek, which flows into the Kenai River in the canyon above Skilak Lake. The Towles named it in 1899, according to Frank, while prospecting below its mouth. It seems likely that the name was connected to the “surprise” of finding gold there. In the mountains across Skilak Lake, the Towles also named Benjamin Creek, which flows into the Killey River. They named the creek for Frank’s older brother Ben, who “was attacked by a brown bear at that place while out prospecting.”

The name that failed to stick was Anvil Lake, which lies near Seward and is known today as Bear Lake. “We named it Anvil Lake,” wrote Frank, “because we were camped [in February 1899] on the shore of the lake and were unloading our sled near the shore…. [When] we dumped out anvil off the sled, it went through the ice and we never recovered it.”

NEXT TIME: The name-change story for Cooper Landing didn’t end with George Towle and Joseph Cooper. Another change nearly cut Cooper out of the picture.