Port of Anchorage: engine of growth for Anchorage since the beginning.

• Author: Goforth, J. Pennelope

The port is the engine of growth for Anchorage. The tents and the people who lived in them, selling goods out of them, and the building materials for the town, complete with the horses that moved them up the hill, all came by ship.

Thousands of people debarked from the popular steamship lines out of San Francisco, Portland, Port Townsend, and Seattle headed to Cook's Inlet. Enterprising local miners hastily built rafts to ferry all the people and their goods from the ships, anchored in deep water, to the muddy shoreline of the creek.

By the time the word went out that Ship Creek would be the terminus of the railroad, workers began the arduous task of building a "corduroy" road made from birch logs that ran for a half mile from the silty mud tideline all the way up to more solid ground. At least where wild grasses held the mud down and rocks held the grasses down.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds of building materials were sent by cargo and barge to be offloaded in the roadsted just off Ship Creek. Ships' cranes offloaded pallets of goods and building materials like cut lumber, spikes and nails, and hundreds of yards of canvas onto hastily built rafts that were poled a few hundred yards right up to one of the mouths of the meandering Ship Creek where the corduroy road began.

Tent cities were a common site across the United States during the railroad building years. Most towns began as tent cities for the workers then evolved into support shacks for the workers, finally followed by wooden buildings for banks, churches, stores, and homes. Anchorage was no different. It just looked more exotic in the wild beauty of Ship Creek with its flashing red and silver salmon and glorious flames of fireweed.

Once the workers were established in their makeshift tent city, the Alaska Engineering Commission rapidly replaced the primitive corduroy road with the first tracks of the railroad right down to the tideline. Building progressed quickly after that. Dredges were brought in by ship and floated in to the meandering byways of the creek digging out the bottom to make it deeper for...