Chugiak turns 70

When a handful of homesteaders clustered along the former Palmer Highway around mile 18 ½ gathered on Feb. 17, 1947 to come up with a name for their new settlement, they landed on “Chugiak,” by folklore a Denai’ina name for “Place of many places.”

The area was settled thousands of years earlier by the Denai’ina Athabascans. The nearby village of Eklutna was home to the old St. Nicholas church, built in the 1800s and which stands as the oldest building in the Anchorage area today.

Today, many of the well-known landmarks around Chugiak-Eagle River bear the imprint of those early settlers. Genn and Mary Lou Briggs, early homesteaders from 1943, owned and operated a farm and later built the Eagle River Shopping Center. Today, the Briggs memorial Scholarship for area high school students gifts assistance with education for future generations in their name.

Some of downtown Eagle River’s land surrounding the shopping center still bears the name of the Pippel family, early homesteaders who farmed in Palmer and Eagle River.

It was young Dave Pippel who, while working for Wallace brothers Art and Til at their concrete manufacturing company in Chugiak in the 1960s, first suggested to Til the best way to get to what later became the Wallace homestead. In an interview with this author in 2013, Wallace talked about early Chugiak days and how he came to develop the popular recreational spot used by locals today at the top of Skyline Drive.

Today, locals drive to the spot on a road that was first paved and extended by Wallace, and hike around the grounds among the ruins of historic cabins that Wallace had moved there. The collection of buildings were finds from historic Chugiak, Anchorage, and surrounding areas, with some of the cabins dating to as early as 1912.

Another local iconic structure stands in testimony to the significant impact the Wallace brothers had on Chugiak: The Chacon, a circa-1912 ship brought to rest near the Wallace brothers’ Fuji Gifts shop in 1982, and brought back to life as a local historic site by daughter Stephanie LeProwse and local volunteers.

Another spot well-known to locals, the Moose Horn Trading post, was owned by Jim and Marie McDowell, and a year after opening in 1946, was also the location of the first post office in Chugiak.

A number of the founding families in Chugiak hailed partially from Europe, according to Coleen Mielke, daughter of the Walker founding family, in her published journal, “Growing Up On The Old Glenn Highway,1950-1968.” It was the post-WWII era, and many of the wives and mothers in early Chugiak were what were then called “war brides.”

The area’s first elementary school, Chugiak Elementary, was established in 1951. Built to a capacity of 45 students, its student body soon exceeded that and early on teachers held classes outside in Quonset huts as well as in the main building. The original building still stands today and is in current use as the Elsie Oberg community center in Chugiak, named for a Chugiak/Birchwood early homesteader who helped found the area’s first high school – Chugiak High School, built in 1964.

Oberg also served on the Chugiak-Eagle River borough school board. The borough was originally incorporated as a move to keep separate from the newly-expanding municipality of Anchorage in the mid-70s, which also swallowed up distinct communities such as Spenard and Girdwood. The fact that the outlying communities were not always part of the municipality is still apparent today in the distinct cultural identities they maintain.

Chugiak High School boasts a top-ranking Alaska football team today, but that wasn’t always the case. A local newspaper headline from the early 1970s that chronicled a first few wins proclaimed, “Chugiak Mustangs: They aren’t hicks anymore.” In 1972, the Mustangs notched their second win in a single season, a first for the team.

In 1969, Chugiak hosted its first Fourth of July parade – today, after nearly 50 years, it’s a still a small, but beloved parade put on by volunteers.

Today, Chugiak is part of a sprawling Chugiak-Eagle River community of more than 30,000. The local high school has a student enrollment of nearly 1,200, with the new Eagle River High School built a little more than a decade ago to handle rising enrollment numbers. Chugiak Elementary is one of a handful in the local area, and has more than 400 students. Residents today enjoy all manner of things that Chugiak’s first founding families didn’t have – running water, or in-residence telephones, for example.

But they still show signs of that old Chugiak spirit, a “place of many places,” named in honor of the Dena’ina people who were there first, and the people from many places who made Chugiak their home.