Grace Peterson (1894-1982) was born to William and Ida Waugh in Darby, Montana, and raised in Hamilton, Montana. In 1913 she married Elwood Boucher, with whom she had a son, Frank. The marriage ended in divorce. Grace first came to Alaska in the spring of 1933. Though a beautician by training, she took the job of housekeeper for the manager of the American Pacific Whaling Company station at Port Hobron, Alaska. She remained there only one season (1933/34), but was soon ready to give Alaska another try. In the spring of 1936 she left a position with the Clairol Instruction Center in Seattle and headed for Anchorage, Alaska. There she married Fred C. J. Peterson, with whom she went into mink farming. In the 1940s the Petersons sold out to the U.S. government, which wanted their land in conjunction with an expansion of Fort Richardson, Alaska. They resided in Anchorage until 1952, when they moved back to Hamilton, Montana. Widowed in 1959, Grace died in a nursing home in Missoula, Montana, in 1982.
Fred C. J. Peterson (1879-1959) was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States with his family at the age of six. Some time in the first decade of the twentieth century Fred moved to Alaska, where he worked as a foreman for a gold mining company, and eventually went into mink farming in the Anchorage area. In 1936 he married Grace Boucher, and together they operated the Mt. McKinley Mink Farm. In the 1940s, when the U.S. government wanted their land in order to expand Fort Richardson, it bought them out and they moved to a house in Anchorage. In 1952 the couple left Alaska to settle in Hamilton, Montana, Grace's hometown. Fred died there in 1959.
From the description of Grace and Fred Peterson papers, 1933-1952. (University of Alaska, Fairbanks). WorldCat record id: 83034731
