The story of how the gardening possibilities of the Last Frontier were developed

Sitka apple trees and Charles Georgeson, circa 1900. (Photo by EW Merrill / Public Domain)

Over 100 years ago, a man traveled north on what most people would consider a foolish mission: to see if crops could grow in the frozen wilderness known as the Alaska Territory.

The man, Charles C. Georgeson, was a special agent with the United States Agricultural Experiment Service, and the Secretary of Agriculture had tasked Georgeson with determining whether crops and livestock could survive on a mysterious piece of land that had been acquired from Russia just 21 years earlier.

When Georgeson landed in Sitka 100 years ago, he began agricultural research that continues today at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Agricultural Experiment Station.

Georgeson, a Danish immigrant, was not a man to be easily discouraged.

In 1898, the Sitka Proving Grounds was in the middle of a swamp, and as he explained in a 1928 interview with Sunset magazine, he rented the land from the Sitka settlers until he could clear and drain it.

“My fields were scattered throughout the village and poorly fenced, or had no fence at all, so local boys, cows, pigs and tame rabbits would run about happily in them,” he says. “The seeds became the playthings of devilish crows, who, with an almost human-like malice, would uproot the little plants only to examine the other side.”

Charles C. Georgeson (Photo by E. W. Merrill/Public Domain)

From this shaky start, the federal government has discovered that crops can indeed survive in the Far North, some more than others.

Georgeson soon helped establish other experimental stations: Kodiak Station in 1898, Rampart Station on the Yukon River in 1900, and Copper Center Station in 1903. The last three were Fairbanks, which opened in 1906, Matanuska Farm Station nine years later, and Palmer Research Center, which opened in 1948.

Between World War I and the Great Depression, federal interest in Alaska agriculture waned: by 1932, the agricultural stations of Sitka, Kenai, Rampart, Kodiak, and Copper Center had all closed, although there were some successes (grains and potatoes grew well in Rampart, for example, Sitka hybrid strawberries were among the hardiest of all, and cattle and sheep thrived at the Kodiak station until 1912 when the Novarupta volcano erupted, covering pastures with up to 18 inches of ash).

The Fairbanks Experimental Farm on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus opened in 1906. Photo taken in September 2014. (Photo by Todd Paris/UAF)

The stations at Fairbanks and Matanuska survived, and horticulturists and animal breeders today continue the same types of experiments Georgeson did 100 years ago, finding plant and animal species that can adapt to the extreme daylight hours and temperatures of the Far North.

Breeding studies produced the first Sitka hybrid strawberry, developed by Georgeson in 1907. Researchers at the Agriculture and Forestry Experiment Station have bred dozens of other varieties that thrive in the North, including the Alaska frostless potato (1970, Matanuska Valley), the Yukon Chief Corn (1974, Fairbanks) and the Toklat strawberry (1976, Fairbanks).

Currently, Alaska-grown crops and livestock account for less than 10 percent of Alaskans' consumption. But the potential is here to grow more. Some parts of Alaska, like the Tanana and Matanuska Valleys, are doing well. One day, it may no longer be cheaper to import food from outside Alaska. Then Georgeson's dream of an Alaska farming state may become a reality.