Text of marker:
Coal, Farms & the Railroad
The mission of the Alaska Railroad was to open up the rich interior for development. Coal, gold, and agriculture were powerful incentives. In October, 1917, the first train reached Chickaloon coal mines, 74 miles northeast of Anchorage. In six days, the first shipment of coal arrived on the shores of Cook Inlet.
The Matanuska Valley was targeted as rich with coal fields and farmlands. As this entry in the Laor Day Parade of 1916 in Anchorage touted in glorious color and optimism: "Matanuska Farms and Chickaloon Coal."
In the 1920's, there were 350 homesteads in the Matanuska Valley, more than a decade before the valley became famous for President Franklin D Roosevelt's "colony experiment" in the years of the Great Depression. Farmers raised cold-weather crops of vegetables, grains, and potatoes. They trapped, hunted, pickled fish and subsisted on less than $100 of cash a year. There was no stable markets for produced and life was not easy.
In 1935, amidst great fanfare in the press, 202 poverty-stricken families from depressed northern regions of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, arrived to carve a pioneer settlement out of the wilderness of Alaska.
The grand experiment was called the Matanuska Valley Colony.
The federal government paid for the cost of the colonists' transportation and agreed to build their homes and barns. The colonists, in turn, had to buy their own land at $5 an acre (uncleared) and purchase or lease the necessary farm equipment and livestock. However, since none of them had any money, the federal government extended generous long-term lines of credit.
The people in Anchorage were desperate for new settlers to the region, so the arrival of the colonists caused great jubilation. But after a short while, there was bitter disappointment all around. Nearly a third of the families had left. Few of the original colonists were farmers and life had proved too rugged in the valley. Those that did stay eventually found a ready market for their produce with the advent of World War II and the military construction boom in Anchorage in the 1940s.
Farming in the Matanuska Valley has seen a roller coaster economy. But there are still farms today, horses grazing in patures, 70-pound cabbages growing in fields, and in the middle of it all, expansive grounds for the largest agricultural fair in Alaska held every year during harvest time.