Rooted in history

May 1, 2005

JOEL DAVIDSON/Frontiersman reporter

MAT-SU - Wayne Bouwens remembers when kids could bring .410 shotguns and .22-caliber rifles to Palmer High School. He remembers gathering at the school on the weekends and kids piling into a school bus to head down a dirt road to the Butte for a weekend of hunting and camping.

Valley life is a little different from those frontier days, but Bouwens, now 75, still has a keen memory of the early years, when the original Matanuska colonists first stepped off an Alaska Railroad train to embark on an experimental lifestyle.

Bouwens was a bright-eyed 5-year-old on May 24, 1935, when he, his mother and 10 siblings rumbled down the tracks toward the Palmer Depot. They were meeting his father and other men who had arrived the day before their families. The Bouwens came from northern Wisconsin, joining 202 families from Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan who were chosen to take part in the Matanuska Colony project.

The project was one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's many New Deal welfare programs aimed at pulling struggling families from the clutches of economic depression. In 1934, the federal government helped secure 260,000 acres of Matanuska Valley land for the colony. In order to make the project fly, the government needed people willing to take a chance.

The one thing all the colonists had in common was poverty and a willingness to try their hand at farming in Alaska, 3,000 miles from home.

"It wasn't the rich and poor. It was all poor," Bouwens said earlier this week as he recalled the hundreds of colonists who left home and loved ones to come to the Valley.

The federal government chose colony families based on a combination of economic need and ability to farm. Bouwens' parents fit the bill. His mother came from a farm family and his father was a butcher by trade, a lawman and a versatile handyman.

"It was a new opportunity for the people that came up," Bouwens said. "This was really an opportunity to get a piece of land and start a new life."

Bouwens' father joined about 200 other men at the railroad depot in downtown Palmer on May 23, one day ahead of the women and

children.

Together, the men drew numbers out of a hat or box to find out which 40-acre plot of forest they would get to transform into farmland. Bouwens' father drew a parcel that is now a large gravel pit just behind the Alaska State Fairgrounds. Back then, however, the acreage was prime farmland.

In exchange for land, a house and a few livestock, Bouwens' family borrowed $3,000 from the federal government, with the understanding that they'd pay it back over the next 30 years.

When the colonists arrived, approximately 100 homesteaders were already living in the area. The influx of colonists signaled a veritable population boom.

In the first years, hundreds of houses, office buildings and other services were erected to support the colony, including a water tower, hospital, churches, steam power plant and Palmer High School, which was constructed in 1936.

The young Bouwens was oblivious to many of the struggles his family overcame in those early years, carving a living from 40 acres of forest.

"You chopped trees down, pulled them out with a little Cat and grubbed them out with horses and block and tackle or whatever way you could get it done," Bouwens said.

While his parents and older siblings worked that summer to build a house and clear land, Bouwens remembered living in temporary tent cities.

"They set up 10 camp sites throughout the Valley so that you would be near where your 40 acres was," Bouwens said. "We lived in them tents all summer until late November."

Over the next dozen years, the Bouwens and about half of the other colonists found ways to grow vegetables and raise dairy cows, chickens and other livestock. The rest of the colonists didn't make it and left within the first five years.

"The markets were damn scarce for the amount of people we had here and the amount of produce that we was producing," Bouwens said. "A lot of them took other jobs or moved into Anchorage."

Bouwens' father eventually became the U.S deputy marshal for the area in 1938.

"He was still farming but he wasn't farming for a living," Bouwens said.

Other colonists, however, stuck with farming, and when massive Alaskan military projects began in the 1940s, the farmers provided soldiers with food and dairy products.

Farmers sold crops to the Matanuska co-op, which then distributed them to the military, gold mines, coal mines and the military.

As he grew older, Bouwens and his younger brother took over more and more operations of the family farm. By the time he graduated from high school, he was ready for something else and his family ended up selling its farm.

After working as a firefighter, railroad worker and coal miner, Bouwens eventually returned to farming at age 35. He bought a 120-acre dairy farm off Palmer-Fishhook Road, which he ran for 12 years before finishing his professional career working at the experimental station on Trunk Road.

Bouwens retired in 1995 but is still very concerned about Valley farming issues, that prime farm land is being lost to housing developments.

He said he understands that aging farmers are often forced to sell land as the only means to retire, but he also believes there has to be a way to preserve the prime farmland colonists helped develop 70 years ago.

"I don't know. I think it's probably most of it's going to go to houses," he said, putting his hands behind his head of white hair. "It's a damn shame, because it's the best farmland we have and

it's right here where the market is."

Bouwens said he hopes local governments will help fund a land trust to help buy the development rights on Valley farmland.

As the Valley gears up for another summer of rapid construction and population influx, Bouwens said he still has fond memories of that first population explosion, seven decades ago.

"I was young, and hell, there was all this place to go run and play. We had Matanuska River and lakes. We had trout and salmon came in the fall. I mean, what more can you ask, for a little boy? It was a lot of fun for us."

Contact Joel Davidson at 352-2266, or joel.davidson@

frontiersman.com.