Palmer Colony celebrates 80th anniversary

PALMER — Just like every year, the annual celebration of Matanuska Valley heritage will contain the fun runs and the bed races and everything else.

Colony Days runs from June 12 to June 14 in downtown Palmer. But, unlike most other years, this one includes a pretty important milestone.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the Matanuska Colony Project, when 406 adults, constituting 202 mostly Midwestern families, moved to Alaska as part of a Great Depression-era project to colonize the Matanuska Valley. The first families arrived on the Alaska Railroad on May 10, 1935.

The Greater Palmer Chamber of Commerce has plans to include events to mark that anniversary in the annual community festival.

“We rent the (Palmer Train) Depot for the entire weekend and Friday night they’re going to have their meet and greet of all the families at the depot,” said Susan Fouch with the chamber.

She said the chamber also plans a parade float featuring some original Colonists in the annual Colony Days parade.

Of the original colonists, though, there are only children left to celebrate. In 2013, the last known surviving Colonist to arrive in Alaska, Minnie Olson, passed away in Kentucky at the age of 101.

For a project that lasted such a short time — most historical accounts say the project ran from 1935 to 1939 and the New Deal, of which the Colony was a part, only lasted until 1945 — the Colonists left an indelible mark on this community.

There is a Colony House Museum preserving a home as it was back in the era from 1935 to 1945. There are entire books written about the project, even getting as specific as one just on the Colony-style barns.

Roads and buildings bear the names of former Colonists, as do generations of families who call the Mat-Su Valley home.

And that’s not even to name the various places that use the word “colony” in their name. There’s the Colony Inn and Colony Middle and High schools, there are coffee stands and apartment buildings that employ the name.

To be able to trace your lineage back to the Colonists is a source of pride for many. To live in or restore a Colony house earns a person a special sort of recognition from his neighbors.

A lot of major institutions owe their genesis to the Colony, from the city of Palmer itself — laid out in the same grid-pattern that the Colonists were used to from the their rural Midwestern homes — to the Matanuska Electric Association, which still provides power from Talkeetna to Eagle River.