Reverend Bingle, Presbyterian minister, arrived just hours before the first special train of project staff and transient workers rolled into town. He wrote:
“May the 6th, 1935, was the date – high noon – when the long coal train with one passenger coach in which I rode just ahead of the caboose, pulled in before a small red shed. There was no depot on the spot – not even a station – just this little shelter from the elements. Before this red shed, on the approach and in the vicinity of the same stood, I assume, most every old settler and every wife of the immediate valley, there to welcome the weekly train crew…”
Bingle noted with satisfaction that because he arrived on the same train as a lawyer and a man looking to open the town’s first saloon, neither got there ahead of the town’s first resident preacher. He enjoyed a “royal” welcome from the “old settlers,” had dinner with MD Snodgrass and family, and set up his tent in a corner of Jim Felton’s field, where he connected his radio to the wire fence around a pigpen.
Photo from the official ARRC photo album, taken later that same day by Willis Geisman.
“The welcoming committee walking down the road at Palmer. May 6th.”
Don Irwin, who was head of the Experiment Station on Trunk Road before becoming general manager of the Colony, wrote:
“Of interest to any student of history were the conditions in the Matanuska Valley in 1935, prior to the time of the Colonists’ arrival.
There were approximately 100 miles of graded road in the Valley in the spring of 1935. Not more than 20 miles was gravel surfaced and none of it was paved. There was no road between the Valley and Anchorage.
. . . .
One scheduled freight train, carrying one mail and baggage car and one passenger car, made one round trip between Anchorage and the Jonesville and Eska Coal Mines each week. The track from Sutton to the Chickaloon coal mines had been removed in 1933.
. . .
Wasilla was the largest town in the Valley, with a population of approximately 100 people. Matanuska, with a population of approximately fifty people, had one general store, one hotel, and one liquor store. Both Wasilla and Matanuska had halls where dances, entertainment, and athletic contests were held.
. . .
One married couple and three elderly bachelors comprised the population of Palmer. A small Alaska Railroad freight house on the branch line was managed by one of the bachelors, James Felton, who was also the postmaster.”
From “The Colorful Matanuska Valley” by Don L. Irwin, 1968
Photo from the ARRC collection
Anchorage Times article from May 7th, 1935
Hewitt’s photo of the transient workers in Anchorage on their way to Palmer
“Freight train coming into Palmer from Seward May 7th, 1 p.m.”
Photo from the ARRC album by Willis Geisman, in the Mary Nan Gamble collection at the Alaska State Library
Reverend Bingle had mixed first impressions of the workers who arrived on the next two trains. He wrote:
“Here needs to be added a note – a cause for the latter dissention of which you read in the daily press. Never was a man expected to do more than was expected of those men in the next twenty-four hours. . . The task to be accomplished was too great for these men, or for any group of men regardless of how good they might be. We have done something to our Youth in America in the last few years, particularly the years from 1929 to 1935. . . This group which came in here . . . the disheartening thing one could notice, they would not even whistle. Sullen, dejected, defeated, cowed down, driven about, they only moved when ordered to do so, and perhaps that was wise.
I saw for the first time what a depression could actually do to humanity.”
“Second contingent transients arriving at Palmer May 7th”
from the ARRC album
Bingle wrote: “Not a minute of that night, and darkness was never altogether present, was there in which you could not hear hammers pounding and saws whining. In spite of its seriousness and later tragedy, it was a relief to learn the next day that the Minnesota Colonists were to be detained at Seward five days due to measles having broken out on ship.”
“Night crew. S. Campbell (Right) in charge. May 8th. 9:40 p.m.”
From the ARRC album
Reverend Bingle wrote:
“The next four days all were full of intense activity. The first day I accompanied the civil engineer collecting land options from the Old Settlers. Not only did I act as witness but on that trip I was introduced to my first Matanuska Valley mud. I do not know where the bottom of that Fishhook Inn road went as we never could find it . . .
Nights we would spend in the Road Commission office which was a box car, looking over blue prints for the new town, learning new plans or chatting with New York newsmen in their quarters, then, later, a number rushing into my little 7×9 tent to pick off the pig pen fence the day’s world happenings.”
Excerpts from booklet “The First Three Years” by B.J. Bingle, Pastor, United Protestant Church, from the Juster Hill Productions collection at the Palmer Historical Society
Photo from the PMHA Anton Anderson collection
Francis Biggs, Assistant Supervising Architect, wrote a memo to Don Irwin detailing the rapid construction of the tent city by the transient workers plus eleven locals. Work each day began at 4 AM and went late at night.
“On Friday, May 10, 1935, work started at 4:00 a.m. and about 5:00 p.m. 69 tents were ready near the railroad siding for families and 4 outhouses completed. This included the installation of kitchen ranges and single bed mattresses. All this was about 15 minutes before the arrival of the train bringing the Minnesota colonists to Palmer.”
F. Biggs memorandum to D. Irwin, quoted in “The Colorful Matanuska Valley