Towns in transition: Seward takes the spotlight.

• Author: Carroll, Ed
• Position: Seward, Alaska

Thirty years after being devastated by the 1964 Good Friday earthquake, this Southcentral town proves it has the strength to prosper.

When the residents of Seward looked around their town in the aftermath of the Good Friday earthquake in 1964, the future looked bleak. Their livelihoods lay wrecked in the twisted ruins of the Alaska Railroad and the Standard Oil tank farm; their collective spirits slumped like the devastated waterfront and docks that had made the town Alaska's transportation hub.

Seward had faced destruction once before, with a fire in World War II. But the Good Friday quake was a disaster of a whole different magnitude. It became clear in the months and years that followed that for the town to survive, its citizens would have to diversify its economic base.

For a visitor 30 years later, little evidence of the quake's damage remains in the landscape or the economy. From a crowded boat harbor to booming construction projects, Seward bursts with energy. In fact, the small-town spirit that guided years of rebuilding and economic recovery has become Seward's greatest earthquake legacy.

A TRANSPORTATION HUB

The town was founded in 1903 by 83 settlers, led by John Ballaine and other officers of the Alaska Central Railway Co., newly formed in Seattle. Leading the efforts of investors to build a railroad that would supply the booming Interior, Ballaine chose Resurrection Bay, an ice-free port just 12 miles from the open waters of the Gulf of Alaska, as the railroad's southern-most point.

Other early entrepreneurs also recognized the importance of Seward's year-round open harbor. The town became the shipping point for raw materials headed Outside, including gold brought in over the Iditarod Trail, the historic overland route that was surveyed and established from Seward.

Well-capitalized at the start, the Alaska Central Railroad's founding crew laid out a street grid and immediately set about building a self-sustaining town. After laying 71 miles of track, however, the railroad enterprise went bankrupt, and the federal government stepped in to complete the project. Despite competition from interests in Cordova and Valdez, the government chose Seward in 1915 as the railroad's southern terminus. Construction and early development along the rails swelled Seward with thousands of workers and the ship-delivered freight to supply the project.

By the time the railroad was completed in 1923, Seward boasted hundreds of jobs in the railroad yards, along the docks and aboard the ships anchoring in its waters. As a garrison town in World War II, the town continued to boom -- a trend that continued in 1952, when the Seward Highway was completed, making Seward the only port town served by the road, rail and ferry system.

For more than 40 years, nearly all the goods that reached Anchorage, Fairbanks and interior Alaska traveled over Seward's docks and up the railway and highway. By the time the earthquake struck in 1964, 2,000 residents lived in the thriving town.

But after the quake tremors died down, Seward's future as a transportation...