Health
The Edible Rail Trail: Palmer, Alaska’s Homegrown Solution for Walkable Food Access
In 1935, as part of the New Deal, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration moved 203 Midwestern families from their economically depressed farms to form the Matanuska Colony in what is now Palmer, Alaska. These agricultural families migrated from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan to the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, approximately 45 miles north of Anchorage, 24 years before Alaska became a state. With 40 acres allocated per family, these farming colonists cultivated the land into what is now the heart of Alaska’s agricultural production.