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About the Project
By spring 1935, the Great Depression had struck with special force the
timber and farming country of the upper Midwest. Drought had
caused many farmers to go under and wonder how they would feed their
families. Franklin Delano
Roosevelt's administration devised an unusual experiment - to resettle
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota residents in the nation's last great frontier, Alaska.
Those three states were chosen to be part
of the project because it was felt those regions most closely
resembled the climate in Alaska, and because they had an
extremely high percentage of residents on social
assistance programs. Local aid workers were given the
responsibility of choosing people to be included in the
project. The following guidelines were given:
"As far as possible, families should be selected first
on their farming ability and secondly, those who may
have secondary skills and who may adjust themselves to a
diversified farming activity and can assist with
carpentry on their homes and then those who may know
something about machinery and blacksmithing and who have
leadership qualities..."
The federal government paid for the
cost of the colonists' transportation, shipping 2,000 pounds of
household goods per family, and agreed to build them homes
and barns. The colonists, however, had to agree to live in Alaska
for 30 years. In May 1935, amidst great fanfare in the press, 202
poverty-stricken families from the depressed northern regions of
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, arrived to carve a pioneer
settlement out of the wilderness of Alaska. In addition, one
family from Oklahoma was in the group, making a total of 203 families. Seven camps were
formed and those families became part of the grand plan called the
Matanuska Valley Colony. A Federal board of nine men, known as the Alaska Rural Rehabilitation Corporation,* was responsible
for providing land and houses for the colonists, and for governing the
colony.
Before the New Deal and the Colony Project, the Matanuska region
received little attention. A handful of people settled in
the area prior to arrival of the Alaska Railroad in 1916. Within a year,
however, there were enough farmers to form an agricultural co-operative,
and over the next few years, about 400 homesteads were applied for.
The settler's ' efforts were aided by taking occasional work in
the coal mines at Chickaloon, or working the gold mines near Willow.
Optimism of the farmers often didn't last long, and many of those
original settlers left. By 1935, barely 100 families remained in the
valley.
The first of the Minnesota contingent arrived at Palmer on May 10,
1935. Families moved into a tent-city erected for them by workers of the
Civilian Conservation Corps. Things did not go smoothly for the
first few months. There were shortages of many supplies, there was mud,
there were complaints that the government store was charging too much
for supplies. Shoddy construction of homes resulted in them being
torn down and rebuilt. As the months dragged on, the issue of
getting the homes built and families in them before winter set in became
a serious one. Huge errors were made in supply and freight
shipments - perishable food supplies were shipped without refrigeration
and rotted, school desks arrived before the lumber to build a school,
grindstones came before axes, electrical appliances before there was any
electricity. Summertime mosquitoes, larger than those they'd
left at home, was nearly the final straw for some colonists.
Slowly though, the colony did come together.
Five styles of homes, of log or frame
construction, were built for the colonists.
Four of the plans were for 1-1/2 story houses, with bedrooms in the half
story. Four plans had a combined living room and kitchen; none had
a separate dining room. The houses had side-gable roofs and were either
L-shaped or had some other element, such as a vestibule, projecting from
the main part of the dwelling. Owners could make minor variations.
They colonists could choose their style of home, but all the barns were
one design - 32-foot, square gambrel-roofed structures, constructed with
logs on the lower portion and frame above.
Each family was granted 40 acres of
land, with the agricultural products to be sold through a farmers'
cooperative association. On May 23, 1935, the
drawing was made for the colonists' tracts of 40 acres each. Arthur Hack
drew the first piece of paper out of the box, and it took 3 hours to
draw all the rest. The colonists paid for the tracts of land at $5 an acre,
then purchased or leased the necessary
farm equipment and livestock. To finance their farms, each family
was
given a $3,000 credit loan, home supplies and equipment which was charged against each householder.
All goods were furnished at the colony
commissary in Palmer.
Colonists were expected to begin paying on these loans about five years
after their arrival - once their first good crop came in.
A small but vital agricultural region,
the lower Matanuska Valley is wide and flat, the soil rich and the
weather moderate. Farmers raised cold-weather crops of vegetables,
grains, and potatoes. The summer growing season - generally 90 frost-free days,
with more than 20 hours of daylight - produced potatoes and cabbages of
such enormity they earned the area nationwide fame. The valley proved
to be equally good for dairy cattle. The colonists trapped, hunted, pickled fish,
and subsisted on less than $100 of cash a year. In those early years of
the colony, there were no stable markets for produce and life was not
easy.
Few of the original colonists were
farmers and life had proved too rugged in the valley for nearly a third
of the families. A gradual elimination of those
families that didn't prove suitable were replaced by others from many
states - north and south. Eventually problems were solved and
the economy of the area stabilized.
About 31 percent of the original settlers
and 43 percent of the replacements still lived in the colony in 1948. Those that did stay found a
ready market for their produce with the advent of World War II and the
military construction boom in Anchorage in the 1940s. The
colony cooperative disbanded in the 1980s, but farms are still present
today - with horses grazing in the pastures, 90-pound cabbages, 30-pound
turnips, and
35-pound heads of broccoli growing in the fields. In addition, one also finds malls and homes for residents who commute by
freeway to Anchorage.
* Established on
April 12, 1935, under the Federal Emergency Relief Administration's program of
organizing Rural Rehabilitation Organizations in the United States.
 See a list of the 203 Matanuska Valley Colony families
here.
Return to the
Matanuska Valley Project index page here.
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