"A Mighty Nice Place": The History of Alaska's 1935 Matanuska Colony Project

In the spring of 1935 the U.S. government took a direct hand in the future of Alaska when it offered 203 Depression-distraught farm families in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin an opportunity to begin again in a far-off land, with government financing and support. The Matanuska Colony Project was part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal for America, an unprecedented series of economic programs designed to provide "Relief, Recovery, and Reform" to people reeling from the Great Depression. Nearly one hundred new communities were designed and developed by Roosevelt's planners, but the largest, most expensive, and most audacious of them all was the plan to build a government-sponsored farming community in Alaska's Matanuska Valley. "A Mighty Nice Place," The History of the 1935 Matanuska Colony Project, by Helen Hegener, explains how a few visionary men convinced the planners in Washington, D.C. to extend their community-building efforts north to Alaska, and tells the story