Homesteads on Fort Richardson, Alaska - The USARAK Home Page ...

Chapter 5.0AnchorageThe history of homesteaders on Fort Richardson is inextricably tied to the historyof the city of Anchorage. As the city grew, homesteading increased correspondingly.Before the Alaska Engineering Commission (AEC) arrived to survey possiblerail routes in 1914, there were very few people in the area. Within a few years,as railroad construction began in 1915, nearly 5,000 people would arrive and makeAnchorage their home. 22 The population over the next thirty years would rise andfall until World War II brought a large influx of permanent development and settlement.Figure 1. Tent city, Anchorage, 1915. Courtesy of Anchorage Museumof History and Art, B94.26.3.Anchorage started as a railroad town.President Woodrow Wilson officiallyannounced the railroad route on April9, 1915. It would extend fromFairbanks to Seward, running throughthe new Ship Creek town site. Manyhad correctly anticipated the courseand were already settling in the area.A “tent city” sprang up seeminglyovernight on the northern side of ShipCreek in what is now GovernmentHill. People flocked into the area hopingto get jobs working for the railroador to supply goods and servicesfor the workers building the line fromAnchorage to Seward. 23Tent city was disorderly at first. Trash was disposed of on the outgoing tides ofCook Inlet. There were no sewers. Officials were concerned that drinking waterwould become contaminated if things were not cleaned up. The land office steppedup the pace of surveying the new 350-acre town site on the south side of ShipCreek. On July 10, 1915, the auctioning of town lots began. Within a few days, 655lots were sold for a grand total of $150,000. The AEC, the federal agency in chargeof Anchorage for the first five years, instructed the people to move off the ShipCreek flats to the new town site by August 16 th . 24People began flooding into the new town and erecting permanent structures. In1916, wide concrete sidewalks were built down Fourth Avenue and the AEC installeda power plant for electricity. By 1917, between 6,000 and 7,000 people wereliving in Anchorage, though only 4,000 were permanent residents. 25 Many of theearly settlers were immigrants from Greece, Russia, Norway, Sweden and Den-22Orlando Miller. The Frontier in Alaska and the Matanuska Colony (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975) p. 25.23Carberry and Lane. Patterns of the Past: An Inventory of Anchorage’s Historic Resources. p. 2.24Elizabeth Tower. Anchorage: From Its Humble Origins as a Railroad Construction Camp (Fairbanks: Epicenter Press, 1998) pp. 28, 29.25Ann Chandonnet. Anchorage, Early Photographs of the Great Land (Whitehorse, Yukon: Wolf Creek Books, 2000) p. 38.<strong>Homesteads</strong> on Fort RichardsonAlaska11