James Sheakley: Alaska's Fourth Governor

The village of Sheakleyville, just down the road, was named for the grandfather of James Sheakley, but James himself would outgrow both the name and the county. Born here in eighteen twenty-nine, he eventually caught the attention of President Grover Cleveland, who appointed him the fourth Territorial Governor of Alaska, a post he held from eighteen ninety-three to eighteen ninety-seven. Before that he had served as United States Commissioner of Schools for Alaska, helping shape the territory's education system from eighteen eighty-seven to eighteen ninety-two.

Alaska in the eighteen nineties was a vast, barely mapped territory with a population spread across remote villages and mining camps. Sheakley spent the better part of a decade trying to govern and educate it. He returned to Pennsylvania and died in nineteen seventeen, remembered in his own county mainly by a village that bears his family's name.