Mostly separate lives: The union and disunion of Nellie and Keith — Part 2

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Forest ranger Louis Keith McCullagh and school teacher Nellie Dee Crabb had married in June 1915 in the fledgling city of Anchorage and made their home there. For a year, their lives progressed on an even keel, but in 1917 their lives began to change.

On June 1, 1917 — two years after becoming a husband and about a year and a half before he became a father — Keith McCullagh resigned from his ranger position with the U.S. Forest Service. According to the Anchorage Daily Times, he was offered two other government jobs (including one in Oregon) but turned down both because he planned to start a private enterprise: commercial fishing on Cook Inlet.

His wife Nellie, a school teacher who had returned a few months earlier from an extended visit to her parents in Iowa, apparently did not return to the classroom in Anchorage. In early 1918, she discovered that she was pregnant, forcing her, as was traditional at the time, to be house-bound. Then in the spring of 1919, Nellie — never one to sit still for long — ran for the position of clerk of the Anchorage School Board.

Keith, meanwhile, continued to fish and to explore other employment options. His draft-registration card, signed in October 1918, indicated that he was an Anchorage resident and a self-employed fish packer, a reference to a herring saltery he and some associates were operating in Halibut Cove.

In 1920, the McCullaghs moved from Anchorage to a new home and a new lifestyle on Kachemak Bay, but by this point their lives were beginning to diverge.

In the fall of 1920, the first public school opened in Homer (then considered part of the Seldovia District). Stanley Nielson, a former student in that school, said that Nellie McCullagh was hired to be the first teacher. She was paid $150 per month.

The Kachemak Bay School — sometimes called the Nielson Canyon School because the large Nielson family provided the learning space and teacher’s quarters within its original log home — featuring homemade benches, a coal-powered potbelly stove and kerosene lanterns for illumination.

Mrs. McCullagh and her daughter, June, lived upstairs above the classroom. When Nellie was teaching downstairs, June had a babysitter. Initially, that babysitter was Susan Bloch (the later namesake of Seldovia’s Susan B. English School).

Interviewed in 1980 about his early life, Stanley Nielson recalled Mrs. McCullagh fondly. “She was a dang good teacher,” he said. Most of the nine students then were Nielsons, recent immigrants from Denmark. Initially none of the Nielson children could speak English. “But we learned quickly,” said Stanley, thanks to their teacher.

“She made things interesting,” he said. “She had a good personality, and everyone enjoyed listening to her play the piano, which she brought over from Seldovia. She and Leroy Holmes used to play duets for our Saturday night dances in the schoolhouse.”

In the meantime, Keith continued to fish commercially. The Seward Gateway referred to him as “one of the principal fish men on (Cook) Inlet.” He was also hatching plans for an entirely new business: fox farming.

In November 1920, according to his own newspaper account, Keith and his family began occupying three small islands off the coast near the entrance to Jakolof Bay. He said they “built a large, comfortable house, with a furnace, and put on eight female and six male fox(es), at a total expense of $2,100 for the stock alone.” His intention was to breed and sell silver foxes and blue foxes, which produced some of the most prized pelts in the fur industry.

The McCullagh enterprise, called the Three Herring Islands Fox Farm, soon began generating a healthy income. Only 11 months after starting the business, Keith had sold 21 six-month-old fox pups for $3,150, thus paying off his original outlay for the breeding stock and about half of his initial home-building expenses. Through successful self-promotion, he was soon producing enough young breeding pairs of his own to interest prospective buyers in Europe.

Nellie taught a second year (1921-22) at the Homer school, and the newspaper in her former home of Cordova took notice. In its Dec. 20, 1920, edition, the Cordova Daily Times wrote: “Mrs. McCullagh is universally liked by every person in the Seldovia district and is particularly fitted to teach the younger generation of Alaska.”

In 1922, the Homer community built a new log school — with a classroom on one side and the teacher’s quarters on the other. Nellie left for Seldovia to help Keith with the fox farm, and she was replaced in Homer for the 1922-23 school year by her younger, unmarried sister, Carlotta Crabb. Carlotta taught in Homer for a year before heading to the public school in Unalaska.

Genevieve “Gene” (often misspelled as “Jean”) Flindall took over the Homer classroom in 1923-24, but a fire in January 1924 destroyed the new facility and nearly all of Flindall’s possessions. Flindall began the 1924-25 school year while simultaneously beginning her own fox-farming business. Nellie McCullagh then returned to Homer to finish the school year, according to a brief note in the Anchorage Daily Times in May 1925.

The Seward Daily Gateway reported that Keith’s fox farm continued to prosper. The paper reported in February 1925 that he had taken 13 silver fox breeding pairs — raised by him and other Cook Inlet fox farmers — to Seattle and then traveled on with them to the East Coast, where they were expected to fetch $1,000 per pair.

In the article, he also announced an expansion of his operation: “My plan is to establish a fox farm in the vicinity of Seattle and make of it a clearing house for foxes raised as breeders. Besides the foxes owned by myself, I will be able to care for animals sent to me by other fox raisers in Alaska, or elsewhere, for that matter, and will be able to find a market for them. Pending the time such market can be found, the animals will have a good place to live.”

By October, he was making an even bigger splash by transporting 90 foxes — a mix of blue, black and silver — to the Lower 48 via steamship. Most of the foxes had already been sold, although Keith told reporters that he planned to take several pairs to Europe to exhibit them in London and Paris. He also hoped to use his foxes to establish fur farms in Sweden and Finland.

In December, a photo of McCullagh, identified as president of the Alaska Western Fox Corporation, along with one of his foxes, appeared in the Seattle Daily Times. The newspaper said that McCullagh was the “personal escort” to 42 silver foxes, valued at $75,000, en route from New York City to Sweden.

By March 1926, he was sailing from Cherbourg, basking in his apparent success, on the S.S. Majestic, bound for New York.

Business seemed good, his marriage not so much.

On Aug. 12, 1927, the list of divorce filings in the Seattle Union Record included Nellie Crabb versus Keith McCullagh. Nellie cited “cruelty” as the reason she sought a split.

TO BE CONTINUED….