When my son moved from Anchorage to Palmer, Alaska, he
bought a house next to a potato field, a house built in the 1930’s. It was
small by today’s standards – the main floor was mostly one open combination
living/dining/kitchen, with a cobbled-in bathroom down steep stairs in the
basement, but it had rustic charm, too, with exposed log beams and rough-hewn
wood floors.
The house got me curious about the early settlement of
Palmer, and I was astonished to discover accounts of one of President
Roosevelt’s New Deal programs that took two hundred and two families off relief
and shipped them up to Alaska to become independent farmers. Fortunately, the
Palmer Library had first-hand accounts from people who had moved up as children
with their families, moving from northern Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin to
begin new lives in the Alaska Territory.
Reading accounts of measles epidemics, a telegram to Mrs.
Roosevelt that resulted in a hospital, mismanagement of supply shipments that
left families in the snow as the first snow fell, and Will Rogers’s visit and
plane crash made me even more curious about the Palmer Colony. I bought every book I could find on the early
days, starting with the Alaskana Books in Palmer, searching eBay and making
copies of books that friends in Alaska owned, and getting copies of 1930’s magazine
articles on interlibrary loan. The Baltimore Sun was selling off its
archive of original Associated Press photographs, and that collection included
a dozen photographs of the colony days, taken by journalists who traveled north to
report on this grand social experiment. I bought nearly everything they had.
You’d think that with mud, mosquitoes, and living in tents
in the snow, people would have unhappy memories of the early days of the Palmer
colony, but most of those interviewed remembered their childhoods in Palmer as
a happy time.
If I were writing a book about the colony, who should tell
the story? I made up Terpsichore Johnson and her friends,
to combine experiences of the real children who came up with their families in
1935. But I also included some of the real people, such as Pastor Bingle, Don
Irwin, and Dr, Albrecht, who were credited with the survival of the colony.
Five years later, I had a draft. Two years after that, I had
a book ready to show an agent. Six months after that, I found agent Steven Chudney,
who championed my book, originally titled Northward,
Ho!, as a variant of the pioneer’s ‘Westward,
Ho!’. He found me the perfect folks to
work with: Nancy Paulsen, and her team
at her imprint of Penguin Books for Young Readers. The contract was
signed around Thanksgiving, 2013. We got into high gear on revisions in 2015,
and the book, now titled Sweet Home
Alaska, is scheduled for release February 2, 2016!
