No matter where you are, they’re there with you

By GREG JOHNSON
Frontiersman

MAT-SU — Traveling south on the Glenn Highway, you take the interchange west onto the George Parks Highway, through downtown Wasilla passing the Meta Rose Library and Dorothy G. Page Museum on your way to the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center. It’s a routine drive in the everyday lives of many who live in the Mat-Su Valley.

For 20 years, the Mat-Su has been the fastest growing area of Alaska, including swelling by 50 percent over the past decade to nearly 90,000 residents. For many of those newcomers, the stories behind the names of some of the Valley’s most recognizable streets and structures remain a mystery.

The Parks Highway is more than one of the main arteries through the Valley, it’s a lifeline for the state’s exploratory and economic past and future. Named for George A. Parks, who was appointed Alaska’s territorial governor in 1925, Parks was an extensive traveler, according to local historian Gerry Keeling. Keeling writes about Parks and other notable people in Bridgette Lively’s book “Matanuska Colony — Sixty Years: The Colonists and their Legacy.”

Keeling penned a chapter called “What’s in a Name?” and describes Parks’ as a mining engineer who spent nearly 80 years exploring Alaska. His namesake highway was completed in 1971 and named for him in 1975. Parks himself lived to the ripe age of 100, dying two weeks before his 101st birthday in 1984.

Naming streets and structures for people who have made important contributions to a community is a good way of preserving local history, said Keeling, a Palmer Historical Society member and curator of the Colony House museum in Palmer.

That’s an opinion shared by Bethany Buckingham, curator of the Dorothy G. Page Museum in Wasilla.

“It’s an honor to name things after people and you are able to maintain their memories,” she said. “At the same time, there are certain things that should be named and certain things that shouldn’t.”

While the museum is a testament to the city’s rich heritage, it’s naming is a tribute to one of the most influential women in Wasilla history. Along with contributing stories and columns to the Frontiersman for years, she was involved in many important events. One of her most important efforts was working with Joe Redington Sr. to start the world famous Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

“The story is, her and Joe Redington were at the Willow Winter Carnival and she had this idea of running a dog sled race, because they were trying to bring back some of Alaska’s history that was being taken over by the planes, trains and automobiles,” Buckingham said in a 2010 interview explaining an Iditarod exhibit at the museum.

From that first 50-mile run, the Iditarod expanded to its current 1,000-plus-mile race and for her role, Page is known as “the Mother of the Iditarod.”

Along with preserving other historic buildings at its downtown site, the museum aims to keep Page’s contributions to Wasilla from fading, Buckingham said.

“We still have people call us the Wasilla museum, and there are multiple museums in Wasilla,” she said. “But the first question usually is ‘who was Dorothy Page?’”

Another question many have is the story behind the Glenn Highway, said Keeling. The highway was the first road to connect Anchorage with the Matanuska Colony at Palmer, which was important because until then the railroad was the Valley’s main connection to Anchorage.

Named for Capt. Edwin Glenn, who led an 1898 U.S. Army expedition to find a route to the Klondike gold fields, the highway was first build in the 1930s and paved in the 1950s, Keeling said.

“The Glenn Highway was not really a direct, immediate connect for the Colony, though,” she said. “That’s a misunderstanding. In fact, the road from Anchorage to Eklutna was put in when the Colonists came. However, there was no crossing of the Knik Arm then, there was no Knik Bridge, so you can see why the highway was so important. Before then, if you were traveling from Anchorage to the Valley, you went by train.”

Today, the highway is more than 325 miles long, has been named a National Scenic Byway and extends north past the Tok cutoff through what Glenn in 1898 described as “the impassible ranges” of the local mountains. It’s a description Keeling chuckles at.

“There’s actually been a lot of passing going through there, huh?” she said. “But what a lot of drama.”

Another of Palmer’s historic structures that has faded to relative obscurity, but has a unique story, is Felton House. Located on what is now Colony Way, the house was built by homesteaders Jim Felton and Georen White in 1935, she said. Over the years it’s been many things to Palmer.

“This building is where the first little grocery store and mail drop was located,” Keeling said. “Next door, there was a building with white pillars and it was called the Felton House.”

Originally, however, the building was a rooming house known as Palmer House, she said.

“In about 1943, Mr. Felton’s rooming house made a national magazine — I don’t remember which one, maybe Life — and he called it the Palmer House. Well, the famous Palmer House in Chicago saw that and threatened a lawsuit if he didn’t change the name. So he named it after himself.”

While many of the area’s buildings and streets are named for people with close ties to the Valley’s early history, others recognize more recent contributions.

The Mat-Su Borough School District opened its central commissary in 2007, it redefined school breakfast and lunch in the Valley. But its official name, the Kurtis Arcala Nutrition Center, has a deep meaning for the district and Valley.

Arcala was a 2001 Palmer High School graduate who was captain of the basketball and soccer teams his senior year. Four years later on Sept. 11, 2005, Arcala became the fifth Alaskan and first from the Valley to die in the Iraq War. He was memorialized at a service at Raven Hall at the Alaska State Fairgrounds.

And that last stop on that journey through the Valley? It has a story as well. The Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center is named for one of the Mat-Su’s most active and influential public servants. Dr. Menard was the first practicing dentist in Wasilla and went on to enjoy a long career as an elected official.

Menard served in the state Legislature in the both the House of Representatives and the Senate. After being diagnosed in 2003 with multiple myeloma, an aggressive bone cancer, Menard ran for and was elected Mat-Su Borough mayor in 2006. Following his death March 3, 2009, the city of Wasilla renamed its sports complex the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center on May 8, 2009.

As for Keeling, whose family came to the Valley as original Colonists, she was the first baby born at the new Valley Hospital built after the Colonists arrived. She has a passion for local history, but said she would balk at the notion of naming a road or building for her.

“Oh, lordy be no,” Keeling said. “My legacy are my daughters. I would feel foolish if they did that. I’m just a mom, but I think it’s wonderful when people care enough to learn about the history and hope it would be valued.”

Contact Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.