Mat-Su celebrates 50th anniversary Thursday

PALMER — In the early 1960s property owners in the area were concerned about potentially being included in what was then known as the Captain Cook Borough.

A few of them were the children of a group of colonists who had lived in what was then an unincorporated area north of Anchorage, according to Mat-Su Borough cultural resources director Fran Seeger-Boss. Shortly after statehood, Parent-Teacher Associations in Palmer and Wasilla began to agitate to form a separate borough.

The proposed Captain Cook Borough would have combined what is now known as the Municipality of Anchorage with the Mat-Su Borough. Cantwell, now part of the Denali borough, voted not to join the new borough, Seeger-Boss said.

“Cantwell was going to be in it, but they chose not to be,” she said. “If you look at the borders of the borough there’s a cookie cutter that goes around Cantwell.”

Hours of community meetings, lawsuits and referenda later, the first Matanuska-Susitna Borough Assembly met in the Palmer High School cafeteria on Jan. 9, 1964. Shortly after, they hired their first full-time employee, borough clerk Libby Martin, for an annual salary of $6,000, according to a history written for the 25th anniversary in 1989.

Now 50 (almost 51) years later, the borough will celebrate the occasion with cake, newspaper clippings, and historic photos on display in the borough assembly chamber as well as crafts for the kids. Borough officials admit the event wasn’t up to the scale of the previous decade’s anniversary. The borough’s 40th anniversary celebration had a lot bigger budget, and featured a lot more information, Seeger-Boss said.

“We had meant to organize a committee and hold a bigger festival,” she said. “We never got off the ground with that. We didn’t have the personnel or finances. This is just a quick picnic, because the 50th year is just about to end.”

The area had a population of slightly fewer the 7,000 people recorded here during the 1970 census. A decade later, the borough’s population exploded to 40,000 during the oil boom, before falling to 36,000 by the mid-1980s, a function of declining oil revenues. That trend was not reversed until the early 1990s, when, in 1993, sales of new homes finally surpassed foreclosures of the oil boom. Seeger-Boss, who arrived in the Valley about this time, remembers those days.

“When I came into the Valley, there were something like 1,600 empty houses,” she said. “A lot of them sustained quite a lot of damage from people leaving. Others were not built very well. They weren’t built square. Houses just went up overnight (in the boom years).”

Two Parent-Teacher Associations based in the nascent communities of Wasilla and Palmer wielded enormous sway in the formative days, Seeger-Boss said.

“The school district had the biggest cloud in the borough at the time,” she said. “There were commissions, but they (the district) seemed to have a lot of clout.”

That might be hard for residents of a 90,000-strong network of communities and towns accustomed to traffic jams, big box stores and an endless parade of new subdivisions to imagine, though at least one borough mayor appears to have had an eye on the future of what has become Alaska’s fastest-growing region.

“Not matter what stage of growth and history each may be in at this time, all communities throughout history started with an idea that was acted upon, then was carried forth through the succeeding generations, with adjustments made along the way to accommodate the economic and other realities,” then-mayor Dorothy Jones wrote in 1989. “Our history has been set but our future is still being molded, and each of us has equal opportunity to make a mark.”

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2269 or brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com.