The story of a few handwritten recipes, bound with a wooden cover from the long-defunct Bear Totem Store in Wrangell, has all the ingredients for a great mystery.

Patricia “Trish” Neal, former director for the Wrangell Museum and current president of Preservation Alaska, frequently checks websites like eBay to see if anything particular to Wrangell history is for sale.

That’s where she found the recipe collection, offered by a seller in Arizona. The seller had found the collection in a box destined for rubbish and thought it too interesting and too particular to just be thrown out.

In addition to a Bear Totem Store imprint on the inside front cover, it was inscribed: “Favorite Recipes of Helen Keller.” Neal, who lives in Anchorage, bought it, and reached out to Wrangell residents Steve and Helen Bakke Keller to see if they had any connection to it. Steve immediately recognized the handwriting as that of his mother, Helen Dorothy Keller, who had lived in North Dakota and never visited Alaska.

Steve was able to piece together some of the story after talking to his sisters. His sister Dorothy had only recently told him he was “living mom’s dream.” While he knew his mother had always said she’d like to visit Alaska, he had no idea how deep that dream ran. 

The Bear Totem Store booklet cover, so particular to Wrangell, is still a mystery to him. “She might have ordered them, or found them in a thrift store, or maybe someone had traveled here and brought them back as a gift,” he said. 

Walter C. Waters opened the store in 1922 on Front Street, where it operated until 1950.

It makes sense that his mother might have used the wooden pieces from the store to craft a present, Steve Keller said. “We never bought presents,” he remembered. “Mom was always helping us to make something for our teachers or whoever.”

Keller said one of his mother’s typical gifts was sharing her favorite recipes. He thinks maybe this particular collection could have been a wedding present to her sister, Gladys, who moved to Arizona, a gift to one traveler from one who dreamed of it.

That could explain why it was discovered in Arizona. It contains a handful of hand-written recipes, with a number of blank papers if the recipient wanted to add their own recipes. No one could have guessed it would ultimately end up in Wrangell, where Steve had come in his 20s, without ever knowing his mother had some connection to the town. 

Neal has put it all together in a book, with the story of the recipe collection and with scanned pages of 18 recipes that were written back-to-back on unevenly cut butcher paper.

She has also included an additional 21 recipes the family shared from Keller’s files and photos of Helen Keller.

Her recently published “Helen Keller’s Favorite Recipes: Preserved from a Handmade Family Cookbook” is available on Amazon. The book also includes a history of Wrangell, with a number of historical photos, many provided by Carolyn and Michael Nore.

Neal has enjoyed following the threads of this story but admits some parts of the tale will remain a mystery. “We can know a lot, but it’s still only a little,” she said.