ALASKA: The Fertile Valley

The train scraped and groaned to a stop, and out climbed the vanguard of 900 solemn men, women and children, arms laden with bundles, eyes filled with bewilderment and doubt. What they saw gave them no cause for rejoicing: a bleak wilderness surrounded by stern, snowcapped mountains, and in the wilderness a dismal tent city sprawling in the mud under a dour sky. This was the Matanuska Valley, 50 miles northeast of Anchorage, in south-central Alaska. This was the promised land—promised by the wide-eyed Federal Emergency Relief Administration to depression-ridden, red-blooded American families who wanted to leave home and make their way, in fine old American tradition, against the wilderness. This was May 11, 1935, a day of heartbreak.

By last week the New Deal’s dream valley (est. pop. 4,000), brimming with prosperity, was Alaska’s biggest farming region. In the 23 years of colonization, Matanuska’s feeble 1,000 acres has grown to about 13,000 acres of cropland worth some $6,000,000, accounts for 55% of Alaska’s salable agriculture (1957 share: $1,854,000 in dairying, potatoes, berries, green vegetables). For a total outlay of about $5,400,000, the Matanuska experiment, says Anchorage Times Publisher Bob Atwood, is “one of the best investments Uncle Sam ever made.”

No Ax to Grind. The big success came because a hardy few managed to surmount the follies of the planners. The first settlers—drawn principally from Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin—were granted 40 acres apiece, plus 30-year loans (at 3%). The Government had promised concrete foundations and basements for cabins, but foundation timbers were laid in the mud. Families received a grindstone, and 20 sacks of coffee beans were sent in, but axes were scarce, and there were no coffee-grinders.

Although the colonists were supposed to be farmers hardened to the rigors of northern winters, it was soon clear that many of them had never even been on a farm, let alone sown anything but wild oats. The first months were a long nightmare; a wheat crop failed because of a poor choice of seed. Some settlers had to stay in tents during the long dark winter. Slowly, their number dwindled (537 left in the first four years) leaving the strong and the dogged, who bought up the abandoned land. Gradually the birthrate climbed, the bulldozers and the plows and the buildings moved into the wilderness.

The big change came in 1938 when the Department of the Interior took over and gave the farmers greater control of their own affairs. Slowly, they began to make the land pay, and by 1940, when the U.S. began its big Alaskan defense buildup and servicemen created a sudden demand for fresh produce and dairy products, the Matanuskans were on their way.

Potatoes & Medicine Balls. Profiting by Alaska’s summer growing conditions (20 hours of sun a day in June), Farmer Max Sherrod, who was a nurse in Michigan before he and his wife moved to the valley, now harvests about 14 tons of potatoes per acre (v. average U.S. yield of eight tons per acre), grows cabbages the size of medicine balls. Another farmer, Wyoming-born Victor Falk, 64, owns 900 acres on the Matanuska River, is raising hogs (1959 target: 700), the first hog yield to be fed on grain stored in the new elevator of the booming ($6,000,000 a year) Matanuska Valley Farmers Cooperating Association. Says Falk: “You can make a living here with the line of least resistance. You can trap, hunt and fish; you can raise vegetables; you don’t really need any money.”

Last week the prosperous Matanuska farmers had finished their harvest and contractors completed a new $400,000 blacktop road through the valley town of Palmer. The valley was growing faster than the wildest dreamers had hoped, seemed destined to be even more prosperous under statehood, since growing Alaska still imports about 90% of all its food. For the 40 or so original Matanuska colonists—out of the original 900—who had looked for the promised land and found hard work, the promise suddenly seemed close at hand.