The Susie was one of three sister sternwheel packet steamboats that plied the Yukon and Nenana rivers in NorthCentral Alaska in the late eighteen and early nineteen hundreds. The Susie, Hanna and Sarah were built in Columbus, Ohio by the Howard family steamboat builders as "kits" which were shipped around the horn to Unalakleet, Alaska, at the mouth of the Yukon River where they were assembled with local wood by the company.
I built this model for the Anchorage Museum of History and Art and it is on permanent display in the Alaska History Gallery in a beautiful glass case. This model is about three feet long and is in HO scale (1:87). It has over thirty thousand pieces and is completely scratchbuilt of wood, metal, styrene and other materials. The sternwheel itself contains two thousand six hundred and twelve pieces.
I will add much more to this page soon, including photos of the actual boats and a map.
Photo by Donna Lindsay.
 |