JENNY MOONIN LEONHARDT , born about 1896, was a legend around Kachemak Bay. According to Elsa Pedersen, in her memoir, Kachemak Bay Years, “It was said that as soon as she spotted a boat coming up the bay she started cooking, and by the time visitors came ashore she had a fine meal on the table. She was known as “Steamboat Jenny” and one of her partners, Charles Patterson, explained why. She was a short but extremely broad and muscular woman, agile on land but awkward and fearful on a boat. One day she planned to go to Seldovia with Harry on the Nell, which was moored in deep water in front of the fox farm. Paddy rowed the two Leonhardts from the beach to the gas boat in his skiff. In the process of transferring to the larger boat, Jenny fell overboard. The men struggled mightily to lift her aboard, but with her weight in addition to her water-soaked clothes they could not raise her out of the water. Finally they put a rope around her and Paddy towed her ashore. “She floated along just like a steamboat,” he remarked when recounting the experience to his friends, and thus Jenny received her nickname. The fox farm made money while she was alive, and the men admitted she had been the driving force.
It isn’t known for sure if Jenny was born a Moonin, and there is some cause to believe that she had been married to a Romanov before she and Harry and Charles Patterson became partners at the fox farm. The 1930 census records list a “Jane Romanoff” born about 1876 as their partner, and she is described as “divorced”. Jenny Leonhardt died in 1936 and is buried in the Seldovia City Cemetery, Plot #114