Topic summary
Matanuska Valley
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Matanuska-Susitna Valley.
In 1935, as part of the New Deal, 203 families from the Midwest traveled to Alaska and started the Matanuska Valley Colony. Families were specifically chosen from the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, due to their similarly cold winter climates. The family’s collective relocation was fictionalized in a chapter of the 1984 novel Alaska by James Michener.