Colony Days recalls our roots

Nowadays, kids study Alaska history in school. But for Larry Vasanoja, the last 76 years of Alaska history are his life.

He was 11 on May 10, 1935, when his family got off the train in Palmer. That’s also the same age his father was when he immigrated from Stockholm, Sweden to Minnesota, Vasanoja said.

“It was a nice spring day,” he recalled. “We spent that first night in tents.”

Although Palmer was established in 1916 as a stop on the Alaska Railroad’s branch line to the Chickaloon coal mines, there wasn’t much there when Laurence and Helen Vasanoja and their five children arrived from Cloquet, Minn.

“There was nothing there,” Vasanoja recalled over dinner at the Elks Lodge recently.

They began their journey on a Union Pacific train bound for San Francisco. From there, a military transport called the St. Mihiel carried them to Seward. The train trip from Seward to Palmer took all day, Vasanoja said.

The Minnesota group came first, followed a few weeks later by families from Michigan and Wisconsin. In all, 204 families made the move.

In preparation for their arrival, Vasanoja said workers had set up tents that included amenities such as wooden floors, iron bunks and a kitchen stove.

That first summer in Alaska was all about fishing for Vasanoja and the other country boys who seemed to take to the place naturally. But the adjustment was harder for the girls, he recalled. “They didn’t really want to fish.”

Palmer’s may be the most famous of the various rural rehabilitation colonies, but other similar projects took place in Cherry Lake Farms, Fla., Dyess Colony, Ark. and Pine Mountain Valley Rural Community, Ga.

The idea moved quickly through official channels after the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Department of Interior Secretary Harold Ickes agreed on Jan. 15, 1935, to undertake the project. In three months, they’d set aside 260,000 acres of land in the Matanuska Valley for the project and by April 23, the first workers and freight were headed north.

Three days after that, the Vasanoja family left Minnesota as part of the first group of Colonists bound for Palmer.

Many families left with in the first five years. In fact, by 1965, only 20 of the original families were still farming in the Valley.

The Vasanoja family stayed. Larry Vasanoja was among the nine-person class that graduated from Palmer High School in 1942. The class had 14 members, but shrank when World War II began. He said a couple of his classmates enlisted and a few families left when the government offered to transport women and children out of Alaska during the war.

Looking back across the years, Vasanoja said the experiment was a success.

“It developed farms, increased population of Alaska and established an agriculture base,” he said.

We mark the 76th anniversary of this experiment with the annual Colony Days celebration, with events planned Thursday through Sunday in Palmer.

On Saturday, be sure and stop by the open house at the Colony House Museum, 316 E. Elmwood Ave. And on Sunday, Colonists and their descendants will gather at the Palmer Elks Lodge for their annual family dinner.

“We’re all — all 200 Colonist families — family,” Vasanoja said. “We have to keep that relationship going.”