Alaskan History
Pioneering Farmers in the Matanuska Valley Knik Garden, 1900. [Photo credit: University of Alaska, Fairbanks]
Providing food for the early gold and coal miners spurred the clearing and planting of the first gardens and farms in south-central Alaska’s Matanuska Valley. By 1906, farmers Henry McKinnon and Hiram Mitchell were both producing large gardens near Knik, and the sales of their produce to the local villagers and miners in the Willow Gold District were the first recorded. Among other firsts in the Valley were Captain Axel Olson’s introduction of three Holstein cattle and one Jersey cow in 1914; W. J. Jeff Bogard’s first flock of sheep; and John Bugge, a homesteader in the Palmer area, who was the first to own mechanical farming equipment, a binder and a threshing machine. The relatively moderate climate and rich soils were conducive to many crops, as shown in early photos of Valley farms. In 1914 Hugh H. Bennett, who made the first Valley soil reconnaissance, reported that a minimum of 1,000 acres had been cleared for cultivation in the Matanuska Valley, primarily near Knik and adjacent to the trails leading to the Willow District gold mines. By 1920 the cleared acreage had almost doubled, due in part to clearing fires set by the railroad construction crews and embers from the steam powered trains; after the wildfires died the farmers only needed to clear away the burnt stumps of the formerly forested land. In Knik Matanuska Susitna: A Visual History of the Valleys, written by Pat O’Hara and a team of researchers and photographers and published by the Mat-Su Borough in 1985, “Homesteaders began settling around Matanuska as early as 1915 when a railroad clearing fire burned a large area between Matanuska and Palmer. For the next two years, potato and vegetable crops sold well, and by 1917, 400 settlers readied their farms for spring planting.
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