Bill Church remembers when the Valley was wild

WASILLA -- For as much as Valley folk have seen drastic and rapid changes to the Mat-Su in recent years, William Church has seen far more than most can imagine.

Church came to the Valley in 1935 with his family. He was 3 years old at the time, a colonist kid who moved here from Wisconsin. His father had been a farmer and a logger and was one of the 200 men who brought their families to the Mat-Su to carve farms out of the wilderness.

Not everyone who came to the Valley in the 1930s made it. The Church family had to sleep in canvas tents their first few years on the land. Since the 40-acre parcels the U.S. government sold to colonists were all virgin woods, the land had to be cleared before it could be farmed.

And the timber in those days was huge, Church said -- cottonwood, birch and spruce trees of a size you don't see anymore in the Valley. The colonists had to clear all that timber in order to make farming fields out of their 40-acre tracts of wilderness.

The government helped out with loans, providing colonists with a horse and a hand-plow, along with enough cows to get their farms going.

"Fortunately, my folks were really hard workers," Church said in an interview early this week. "The ones who could work hard and knew a little about farming stayed. But most of them left, moved to Anchorage or went out to help build Fort Rich."

Growing up with three brothers and three sisters, Church spent his childhood in a farm boy's paradise. He and his brothers hunted rabbits and trapped muskrats like crazy, he said, and the abundance was amazing.

"It was so peaceful. There were so few people around when I was a kid, we could fish and hunt wherever we wanted," Church said. "I feel sorry for kids nowadays."

Church said his uncle was a blacksmith and used to make metal fishing spears for him and his brothers to take down to Wasilla Creek when the king salmon run came in. There were so many salmon in the creek, it was easy to spear them out.

"I remember the fish were so thick in there, sometimes you couldn't even walk across the creek," Church said. "We'd get 60-, 70-pound kings coming right up the creek."

Church graduated from Wasilla High School in 1950 and joined the Army in 1952 as infantry. Church served for two years, until 1954, but was never sent to Korea. Instead, he was chosen to be a weapons instructor because of his prowess with a rifle, and remained at Fort Richardson during his enlistment. "Just lucky, I guess," he said.

After the Army, Church bought land near Wasilla, just off what is now aptly named Church Road. He and his wife, Ruby, homesteaded 160 acres in Mission Hills, and still live on 30 of those acres in a house he has "been building" since 1955.

Church says he farmed the homestead a little at first, but it became too expensive, so he sold some of it off. Mission Hills subdivision now sits on part of that land, which is just fine by him.

"The changes around [the Valley] are totally amazing," he said. "I don't know if it's good or bad."

But Church isn't one of those people who complain about change. Change happens, he said, and it mostly seems good to him. To put things in perspective, Church said he can remember the old-timers complaining about the influx of colonists to the Valley in the 1930s.

There were plenty of homesteaders who came to Mat-Su in the first decades of the 20th century and had been farming the land for 10 or 20 years before some 1,000 colonists arrived on trains in 1935.

"These old boys who had come here in 1917 and 1918, most of them knew the trains were coming with these colonists so they went down and were standing there watching them arrive," Church said. "And I can just picture these old boys standing there saying, 'Oh Jesus, this is the end of the Valley.'

"And I remember when we started getting an influx of new people in here later, I don't how many times I would hear people say, 'God, I hate to see this,' but it's never affected me that way," Church said. "It's never bothered me."

Contact John Davidson at john.davidson@frontiersman.com.