AUTHOR’S NOTE: Cooper Landing, on the Kenai Peninsula, was once identified with a postal inspector named Charles Arthur Riddiford. In fact, residents of the landing named their first post office and their first school after Riddiford, a man who never lived in Alaska. This is the story of how that naming likely came to be.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Place names can be ephemeral. And they can fade for myriad reasons. Sometimes offensive names are replaced by more appropriate appellations, as in the case of Dillingham’s Squaw Creek recently being given the Yup’ik name Amau Creek. Sometimes names disappear, such as when the planned community of Gruening, named for Alaska’s U.S. Senator Ernest Gruening, was a Nikiski-area dream that never quite came true. This is the story of Riddiford, which was the name of the community at the outlet at Kenai Lake — until it suddenly no longer was.
A December 1913 heist at Wallace’s post office remained unsolved for over a year and a half so long that some of the town’s citizens surmised that the redoubtable postal inspector service, the post office’s highly respected police force, had finally met its match. But patience won out.