By Heather Lende

Friends and family members gathered Thursday in one of Bonnie Jean Potter’s favorite places, the Port Chilkoot Bible Church, to sing classic hymns and gospel tunes – The Old Rugged Cross, I’ll Fly Away and Amazing Grace – to celebrate the life of one of the highway community’s old timers.

Potter, 76, died Nov. 27 in Bartlett Regional Hospital of complications following gall bladder surgery.

When Potter and husband Jerry arrived in Haines in 1960 with four young children in tow, Main Street was a muddy rut. Jerry took a job working in the woods for a lumber company and Bonnie set up house in a cabin on Chilkat Inlet at Jones Point.

She taught Sunday school for the fledgling Port Chilkoot Bible Church, which didn’t have a building yet, and volunteered at the library. When the librarian got ill, she took over, earning $62.50 a month. She called it her dream job.

In a May Anchorage Daily News feature, Potter told pioneer story collectors Ed and Milinda May that when she saw the library, " I looked at all of those books and wanted to read every one of them."

Roger Potter said his mother remained an avid reader, and each year made a list of the 100 best books she’d read, from fiction and biography to how-to books. "She read all kinds of books, all the time, and when she saw a different magazine she’d grab it."

She left the library when the family moved out to a 20-acre parcel at 31 Mile where she embarked on a new career. "Bonnie was the quintessential homesteader," said Carolyn Weishahn.

The Potters built a 16 by 20 foot cabin, cleared a garden space and raised livestock. Bonnie had a herd of milking goats that at one time swelled to 30 and made all her own yogurt and cheese. She also raised pigs, sheep, chickens, guinea fowl, ducks and peacocks.

Jerry hunted and fished and Bonnie butchered meat and canned fish, and put up enough garden produce to feed her family through the winter. In the spring she foraged for nettles and fiddleheads and in the late summer she picked and preserved berries.

"She did it all, and before there was power," Weishahn said. The Potters were mentors for her family. "Bonnie was kind, generous, laid back and very knowledgeable," she said.

Roger Potter said she provided her children an idyllic youth. "We had a lot of fun. She gave us free rein, as long as we carried guns of course, because there were bears around."

Bonnie Potter took time out just about every Sunday morning to attend church, either in town, or at the New Hope Fellowship Church at Little Boulder Creek near her home. She tithed, and Roger Potter said, recently re-read the Bible cover to cover.

Potter was born in Corvallis, Ore. on Aug. 9, 1931 to Edna Leder Shimmin and Norman Shimmin. She was raised in Coos Bay, Lebanon and Pedee where she married Jerry Potter on her birthday in 1947. The family lived in Salem, Ore. where she worked at the Blue Lake Cannery before coming north.

Last year, Potter told the Mays that she had always wanted to come to Alaska, and her life here had more than met her expectations. She was even a bit wistful about the early years – before television and power lines, when she kept her perishables in a snow bank in the winter and box in the creek in the summer.

"You learned to make do," she said. It was a whole different world back then."

Potter was buried at Jones Point Cemetery next her son, Paul. Sister Norma Holland also preceded her in death. She is survived by husband Jerry, sons Mike and Roger of Haines; daughter Sharon Cobos of Keitzer, Ore.; siblings Pauletta Bushnell, Roland Shimmin and Bob Gummere; grandchildren Matthew, Tim, Twyla and Jeremy Cobos, Douglas Potter and Tiffanie Potter as well as thirteen great-grandchildren.