Alaska's Mantansuska Valley and Farm Colonies

This edition of America’s Heartland comes to you from the Matanuska valley outside Anchorage, Alaska.

It’s not the first place you’d think to find American agriculture but as we’ve learned,  it doesn’t matter where you travel in our United States: the lower forty-eight, the islands of Hawaii, or here in Alaska.   Regardless, you will find people passionate about the business of providing food, fuel and fiber for the rest of us.   We found a vivid example in the fertile Matanuska Valley, where we met some of  descendants of a bold Depression-era farming experiment.

“If you wanted to better yourself and make a future for your family, this was probably the best place to do it,” recalls Wayne Bouwens.  Helen Riley agrees. “ I think for them, this was their biggest thing, this was going to be our own. We could farm, and it would be ours. “

Both Wayne and Helen are referring to their parents: struggling Midwestern farmers who left behind poverty and hopelessness for a fresh start on America’s last frontier: Alaska.

In 1935, one of the worst years of the Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt approved a New Deal program that sent over offered a new life to over two  hundred  Michigan,  Wisconsin and Minnesota farm families. Their destination: the Matanuska Valley.   Helen’s parents had been struggling tenant farmers in Menomene, Michigan.

“And they came not looking back,” Helen remembers. “ My mom was 98 when she passed away, and to her dying day she said, ‘Alaska is the best place in the vorld.’”

To be sure, it wasn’t an easy journey  from Michigan to Matanuska.  Most of the five hundred colonists  traveled by rail to San Francisco, then boarded Army transport ships that sailed up the Pacific coast to the town of Seward.  Then, it was yet another train trip to Anchorage and the  Matanuska.  Once there, the pioneers camped out in tents while government work crews helped them build houses on their forty to eighty acre parcels. A bit challenging and stressful for grownups, but for youngsters.

“For a five year old, it was nothing but fun,” laughs Wayne. “ And the folks would try to get us to sleep because it was 10 or 12 o’clock at night, and they had to go to work, and we’d crawl out of the tent, ‘go to bed!’, ‘well, it ain’t dark!’ ‘well, it ain’t going to get dark!’”

At one point in the 1950’s, the Matanuska Colony supplied half the state’s eggs, milk, vegetables and other commodities.  Not every colonist succeeded – winters were harsh, and the growing season short.  As many as half of them eventually returned to the lower 48.  But others, like Helen and Wayne, fell in love with this fertile, beautiful, untamed place.   They’ve kept their farms in the family, for new generations to work the land.

“My parents didn’t fail because they came here with the attitude ‘we are going to make it, this is our chance to make it,’ and they were hard workers and they set their mind to it, and they did it.,”  says Helen.  Wayne agrees. “If you put in your sweat and blood towards it, you could make it. For my family, it was great.“

Nowadays, Helen and Wayne spend their time volunteering at the Farm Colony museum in Palmer.  An original farm house was moved downtown and restored to house the museum.  They, and others like them, are living links to a fascinating social and agricultural experiment a unique moment in history they enjoy sharing with others. 

Do they think others, including their own grandchildren, can really appreciate what they went through? “No, I don’t think they can fathom it.  I know my own kids, I think they sometimes look at you like, ‘You must be making up these stories! It couldn’t have been like that.’”

For More Information:

http://www.explorenorth.com/library/yafeatures/bl-matanuska.htm

Colony Farm House Museum
316 East Elmwood
Palmer, AK
907.745.3703