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Sealing Plant National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form text: 1951. This complex burned down in 1950 and was rebuilt over the original foundation. A wood frame building with concrete walls. Older methods of processing are reflected in this building and its extant equipment: wash house, kench house with tables, brine tanks and blubbering house, and a cooperage upstairs where some barrel staves remain. Skins were placed in redwood vats with large metal waffle grates placed on top to hold them down while they were flushed with sea water. These vats remain in the wash house as do the blubbering racks in the blubbering house. The 12’x12’ kench tables, some still holding skins in salt for storage, are intact. The salting process was replaced by the newer brine process. Here skins were placed in a redwood tank, agitated by a paddle wheel, hung to dry, packed in borax, rather than salt, and then shipped to the Fouke Company. The extant redwood tank may be the last of its kind. Cement tanks with slat boxes and a re-designed paddle wheel replaced the redwood tank. Presently, National Marine Fisheries (NMF) personnel are in the process of converting part of the ground floor into a laboratory with living quarters upstairs. Previously, NMF personnel added some removable fencing in the wash house creating seal pens used in conducting seal behavior experiments. Other than these changes to the interior, which are consistent with its historic use, the seal processing facility retains its historical integrity (Faulkner 1986). Click here to read the Seal Plant Restoration Report (pdf).
St. George Sealing Plant Videos
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NOAA created this product in partial fulfillment
of a memorandum of agreement between it and the Alaska State Historic
Preservation Officer. |
