Spruce Island is an island in the Kodiak Archipelago

Kodiak Archipelago

The Kodiak Archipelago is an archipelago, or group of islands, south of main land mass of the state of Alaska , about by air south of Anchorage in the Gulf of Alaska. The largest island in the archipelago is Kodiak Island, the second largest island in the United States...

 of the Gulf of Alaska

Gulf of Alaska

The Gulf of Alaska is an arm of the Pacific Ocean defined by the curve of the southern coast of Alaska, stretching from the Alaska Peninsula and Kodiak Island in the west to the Alexander Archipelago in the east, where Glacier Bay and the Inside Passage are found.The entire shoreline of the Gulf is...

 in the state of Alaska

Alaska

Alaska is the largest state in the United States by area. It is situated in the northwest extremity of the North American continent, with Canada to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, with Russia further west across the Bering Strait...

, USA. It lies just off the northeast corner of Kodiak Island

Kodiak Island

Kodiak Island is a large island on the south coast of the U.S. state of Alaska, separated from the Alaska mainland by the Shelikof Strait. The largest island in the Kodiak Archipelago, Kodiak Island is the second largest island in the United States and the 80th largest island in the world, with an...

, across the Narrow Strait. Spruce Island has a land area of 46.066 km² (17.786 sq mi) and a population of 242 as of the 2000 census

United States Census, 2000

The Twenty-second United States Census, known as Census 2000 and conducted by the Census Bureau, determined the resident population of the United States on April 1, 2000, to be 281,421,906, an increase of 13.2% over the 248,709,873 persons enumerated during the 1990 Census...

, mostly in its only city, Ouzinkie

Ouzinkie, Alaska

Ouzinkie, pronounced , is a city on Spruce Island in Kodiak Island Borough, Alaska, United States. At the 2000 census the population was 225.-Geography:Ouzinkie is located at ....

, in the southwestern part of the island.

From 1808 to 1818, Spruce Island was the hermitage

Hermitage (religious retreat)

Although today's meaning is usually a place where a hermit lives in seclusion from the world, hermitage was more commonly used to mean a settlement where a person or a group of people lived religiously, in seclusion.-Western Christian Tradition:...

 of Herman of Alaska

Herman of Alaska

Saint Herman of Alaska was one of the first Eastern Orthodox missionaries to the New World, and is considered by Orthodox Christians to be the patron saint of the Americas.-Biography:Saint Herman was born in the town of Serpukhov in the Moscow Diocese around 1756...

, later sainted and considered the patron saint of the Orthodox Church in the Americas.