A community block-party picnic and portrait of the people of the Chilkat Valley are set for 1 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 15.
The location will be Main Street between Third and Fourth avenues, which will be closed to traffic.
The picnic is a celebration of the centennial of Haines’ municipal incorporation and will include a panoramic photo of the town’s residents, similar to a millennium portrait shot on the Fort Seward parade grounds in May 1999.
“It’s important that we celebrate anniversaries like this. It’s a fun thing to do and it gives us a fun reason to be together,”said borough Mayor and centennial committee member Jan Hill. “We take ourselves way too seriously a lot of the time. None of us are going to be here for the next centennial, so let’s have fun while we’re here.”
Hill said the Main Street location fits into the original townsite celebrated by the centennial. The party also will be reminiscent of street dances held there while she was growing up, when a juke box from Moose Horn Cafe was pushed facing Main Street.
The Haines Borough will pick up the tab for hot dogs, hamburgers and garden burgers, and residents are asked to bring a side dish, salad or dessert. Plans are for live music.
Hill said she’ll be flipping burgers and she’s challenging all former mayors to come give her a hand. “I’m going to be cooking and I’ll need some help.”
Juneau photographer Ron Klein, who’s known in the region for his panoramic photos of crowds at Celebration and Alaska Folk Festival, will again take the big picture.
Appropriately enough, Klein uses a Cirkut camera, invented in 1902, to take his photos that typically measure four to five feet in length. The camera rotates and the film inside – which is 10 inches high and six-feet long — turns at the same time, creating a negative as big as the final print.
Klein said he was planning to use a Cirkut dating to 1920 for the Haines photo, but said he could “dig through my junk” and maybe find a 1910 model. He owns a dozen of them, including one used by Floyd Sheelor, who took panoramic photos of Haines and Fort Seward about 100 years ago.
Klein said he also may come to town in his 1929 Model A Phaeton Ford convertible touring car.
Mayor Hill said she’s hoping the picnic will become an annual event. “Why not celebrate that we live in Haines. I think that’s worth celebrating.”
The picnic and photo are organized by the borough’s centennial committee. The group also recently posted enlarged, historic photos in the windows of the old Coliseum Theater building.
Committee chair Jerrie Clarke said this week she’d like residents with old photos of the town, its buildings or residents to come forward. Those photos also can be enlarged and posted at Main Street buildings during the centennial celebration.
Clarke, curator of Sheldon Museum, said the photos also may be scanned for inclusion in museum archives. Clarke said the museum has photos from the first half of the 20th century, but relatively fewer from the 1950s and 1960s.
While 1950 doesn’t seem very long ago to many people alive today, “fifty years from now it’s going to seem like ancient history.”
A copy of the 1999 community portrait will be on display at the Haines bank.