in 1955, looking easterly from Second Avenue and Cushman Street. The now-demolished
Polaris Building, the tallest building in Fairbanks since its completion in 1952, is in the background.
Alaska Native presence Athabascan peoples have lived on, traveled through, and stewarded the land of the Fairbanks area
for thousands of years. Fairbanks continues to benefit from the leadership and influence of people from Athabascan and other Alaska Native communities. An archaeological site excavated on the grounds of the
University of Alaska Fairbanks uncovered a Native camp about 3,500 years old, with older remains found at deeper levels. From evidence gathered at the site, archaeologists surmise that Native activities in the area included seasonal hunting and fishing. In addition, archaeological sites on the grounds of nearby
Fort Wainwright date back well over 10,000 years. Arrowheads excavated from the University of Alaska Fairbanks site matched similar items found in Asia, providing some of the first evidence that humans arrived in North America via the Bering Strait land bridge in deep antiquity. Teams of gold prospectors soon congregated in and around the newly founded Fairbanks; they built drift mines, dredges, and lode mines in addition to panning and sluicing. After some urging by
James Wickersham, who later moved the seat of the
Third Division court from
Eagle to Fairbanks, the settlement was named after
Charles W. Fairbanks, a Republican senator from
Indiana and later the twenty-sixth vice president of the United States, serving under
Theodore Roosevelt during his second term. In these early years of settlement, the
Tanana Valley was an important agricultural center for Alaska until the establishment of the
Matanuska Valley Colonization Project and the town of
Palmer in 1935. Agricultural activity still occurs today in the
Tanana Valley, but mostly to the southeast of Fairbanks in the communities of
Salcha and
Delta Junction. During the early days of Fairbanks, its vicinity was a major producer of agricultural goods. What is now the northern reaches of South Fairbanks was originally the farm of Paul J. Rickert, who came from nearby
Chena in 1904 and operated a large farm until his death in 1938. Farmers Loop Road and Badger Road, loop roads north and east (respectively) of Fairbanks, were also home to major farming activity. Badger Road is named for Harry Markley Badger, an early resident of Fairbanks who later established a farm along the road and became known as "the
Strawberry King". Ballaine and McGrath Roads, side roads of Farmers Loop Road, were also named for prominent local farmers, whose farms were in the immediate vicinity of their respective namesake roads. Despite early efforts by the
Alaska Loyal League, the Tanana Valley Agriculture Association and William Fentress Thompson, the editor-publisher of the
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, to encourage food production, agriculture in the area was never able to fully support the population, although it came close in the 1920s. The construction of
Ladd Army Airfield starting in 1939, part of a larger effort by the federal government during the
New Deal and
World War II to install major infrastructure in the territory for the first time, fostered an economic and population boom in Fairbanks which extended beyond the end of the war. In the 1940s the
Canol pipeline extended north from Whitehorse for a few years. The
Haines - Fairbanks 626 mile long 8" petroleum products pipeline was constructed during the period 1953–55. The presence of the U.S. military has remained strong in Fairbanks. Ladd became
Fort Wainwright in 1960; the post was annexed into Fairbanks city limits during the 1980s. Fairbanks suffered from several floods in its first seven decades, whether from ice jams during spring breakup or heavy rainfall. The first bridge crossing the Chena River, a wooden structure built in 1904 to extend Turner Street northward to connect with the wagon roads leading to the gold mining camps, often washed out before a permanent bridge was constructed at Cushman Street in 1917 by the
Alaska Road Commission. On August 14, 1967, after record rainfall upstream, the Chena began to surge over its banks, flooding almost the entire town of Fairbanks overnight. This disaster led to the creation of the Chena River Lakes Flood Control Project, which built and operates the Moose Creek Dam in the Chena River and accompanying spillway. The project was designed to prevent a repetition of the 1967 flood by being able to divert water in the Chena upstream from Fairbanks into the Tanana River, thus bypassing the city.
Railroad history at
Fairbanks Depot After large-scale gold mining began north of Fairbanks, miners wanted to build a railroad from the steamboat docks on the Chena River to the mine sites in the hills north of the city. The result was the Tanana Mines Railroad, which started operations in September 1905, using what had been the first steam locomotive in the Yukon Territory. In 1907, the railroad was reorganized and named the
Tanana Valley Railroad. The railroad continued expanding until 1910, when the first gold boom began to falter and the introduction of automobiles into Fairbanks took business away from the railroad. In 1914, the U.S. Congress appropriated $35 million for construction of the Alaska Railroad system, but work was delayed by the outbreak of World War I. Three years later, the Alaska Railroad purchased the Tanana Valley Railroad, which had suffered from the wartime economic problems. In summer, the railroad operates tourist trains to and from Fairbanks, and it operates occasional passenger trains throughout the year. The majority of its business through Fairbanks is freight. The railroad is planning an expansion of the rail line from Fairbanks to connect the city via rail with
Delta Junction, about southeast.
Road history As the transportation hub for Interior Alaska, Fairbanks features extensive road, rail, and air connections to the rest of Alaska and outside of Alaska. At Fairbanks's founding, the only way to reach the new city was via steamboat on the Chena River. In 1904, money intended to improve the
Valdez-Eagle Trail was diverted to build a branch trail, giving Fairbanks its first overland connection to the outside world. The resulting
Richardson Highway was created in 1910 after Gen.
Wilds P. Richardson upgraded it to a wagon road. In the 1920s, it was improved further and made navigable by automobiles, but it was not paved until 1957. Fairbanks's road connections were improved in 1927, when the
Steese Highway connected the city to the Yukon River at the gold-mining community of
Circle. In 1942, the
Alaska Highway connected the Richardson Highway to the Canadian road system, allowing road travel from the rest of the United States to Fairbanks, which is considered the unofficial end of the highway. Because of World War II, civilian traffic was not permitted on the highway until 1948. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a series of roads were built to connect Fairbanks to the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay. The
Elliott Highway was built in 1957 to connect Fairbanks to
Livengood, southern terminus of the
Dalton Highway, which ends in
Deadhorse on the North Slope. West of the Dalton intersection, the Elliott Highway extends to
Manley Hot Springs on the Tanana River. Until 1940, none of Fairbanks's surface streets were paved. The outbreak of World War II interrupted plans to pave most of the city's roads, and a movement toward large-scale paving did not begin until 1953, when the city paved 30 blocks of streets. During the late 1950s and the 1960s, the remainder of the city's streets were converted from gravel roads to asphalt surfaces. Few have been repaved since that time; a 2008 survey of city streets indicated the average age of a street in Fairbanks was 31 years. ==Geography==