Sons of Norway Hall
Alaska
Welcome to Petersburg, a fishing town so Norwegian it calls itself Little Norway. This big white building, decked in colorful painted flowers, is the Sons of Norway Hall, and it was the very first such lodge built in all of Alaska. Lodge members raised the money in nineteen twelve by borrowing and by selling shares.
They built it deliberately large, big enough to hold the whole town for weddings, dances, plays, and meetings. During World War Two it served as an armory, and in the nineteen sixties it became National Guard headquarters. It sits along Sing Lee Alley, a row of weathered wooden buildings perched on pilings over the slough, named for a local merchant.
The hall joined the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-nine.
