HISTORY CHAPTER 1
THE MUSEUM
BUILT BY THE COMMUNITY,
FOR THE COMMUNITY
The Clausen Museum began not with a building, but with a determination to remember. In 1962, Elsie Clausen and members of the local Pioneers of Alaska opened an informal museum in the Petersburg City Council chambers. They called it the Petersburg Museum Society, and it was exactly what it sounds like — neighbors deciding that their stories were worth keeping.
Elsie Clausen
Carroll Clausen
In January 1964, Elsie and Carroll Clausen began the harder work: building a proper museum. They raised money, organized volunteer work parties, and rallied a community around a shared conviction that Petersburg’s history deserved a permanent home. It wasn’t a grant that built this museum — it was neighbors with a purpose.
In 1967, funding came through the Alaska Centennial Fund. The building was completed. The name was changed to the Clausen Memorial Museum. And on May 11, 1967, Petersburg’s history museum opened its doors for the first time.
More than five decades later the mission is the same, even as the collection has grown to 3,075 artifacts, 9,608 photographs and negatives, and 754 archival collections spanning the history and pre-history of Petersburg and the surrounding area. The museum is still community-run, still nonprofit, still governed by a Board of Trustees drawn from the town itself. Still driven by the same belief Elsie and Carroll started with: that these stories matter, and that they belong to everyone.
1962
1962 Elsie Clausen and the Pioneers of Alaska establish the Petersburg Museum Society in City Council chambers.
1964
Elsie and Carroll Clausen begin fundraising and organizing volunteers to build a proper museum.
1967
Alaska's Centennial year. The Alaska Centennial Fund money comes through, the building is finished, and the Clausen Memorial Museum opens on May 11. The Fisk is installed at the museum entrance.
1980s
The museum building is expanded - a front addition brings proper entrance, bathrooms, gift shop, and office space.
2013
The Fisk gets new stonework and a regraveled courtyard, giving it a fresh setting after more than 45 years.
TODAY
The Clausen Memorial Museum becomes the Clausen Museum: a shorter name for the same place. There are art shows, open mic nights, Paint and Sip, a summer youth art class, and gallery space for local artists year-round. It is still community-run, still nonprofit, and still governed by trustees from town.
Fisk
the town’s catch, cast in bronze
Norwegian for fish · Bronze fountain · Est. 1967
Sculptor Carson Boysen
The Fisk has stood at the museum entrance since the day it opened in 1967. The word is Norwegian for fish — but this is no simple salmon on a pedestal. Sculpted by Carson Boysen and commissioned as part of Alaska’s Centennial celebration, the 10-foot bronze fountain is a full portrait of the Petersburg fishery: halibut, sablefish, five species of salmon, and schools of herring spiraling outward in every direction. The sculpture is fully three-dimensional — designed to be walked around, discovered from every angle, water moving through it as if the whole harvest is still alive and running.
It is the town’s catch, cast in bronze. Everything Petersburg was built on, frozen in motion at the front door of the museum that keeps its story.
