How Skagway Became the “Garden City of Alaska”: A Century of Gardens

A dahlia grown in Skagway in 1929 went uncontested as the world’s largest for thirty years. That is one of the stories in a National Park Service history, researched and written by Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park in April 2012 and first given as a radio talk, of how a gold rush boomtown became the “Garden City of Alaska.” Early visitors were surprised by neat plots of flowers and vegetables beside rough buildings, when they had expected only a tough frontier town of bars and brothels.

A variety of vegetables on display in Skagway, 1915. National Park Service, Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, Lois Butt Collection.

Vegetables first

Gardening in Alaska goes back to Russian colonization, when produce fed missionaries, soldiers and traders. The first garden in the Skagway area was behind the Dyea trading post of John J. Healy and Edgar Wilson, and its cabbage, lettuce, cauliflower, beets, peas, carrots, potatoes and parsnips were bought by Klondike hopefuls who would otherwise carry only flapjacks, beans and coffee into the Yukon. Skagway’s transient gold rush population hindered cultivation, but some more permanent families grew potatoes on the hills around town, and one graduate of Kansas State Agricultural College harvested 54 varieties of 24 vegetables, with turnips of over four pounds as his best crop.

As Skagway settled with the help of the White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad, residents took advantage of its conditions. Compared with most of southeastern Alaska, the Upper Lynn Canal area has longer summer days, less rain and more sunlight, and the dry summer days keep the soil less acidic because rain leaches it. Families grew food for themselves and for markets, and produce sometimes reached Haines, Whitehorse and Juneau. In 1901 farmers said self-sufficiency was in sight and added onions, beets, pumpkins and strawberries to their door-to-door deliveries.

Flowers and a nickname

Flower gardens took root too. The agricultural experiment station agent from Sitka who visited in 1901 found the flower beds as good as the best he had seen anywhere, with pansies and sweet peas favorites and poppies, nasturtiums and marigolds also common, and extraordinary luxuriance. In 1902 the jeweler Herman Kirmse began a gardening contest, which was a standard Skagway activity until 1906. That year the railroad began advertising to tourists, and its material used photos of Skagway’s flower gardens to show civility amid gold rush history. Gardeners came from all social and economic classes: the men largely grew vegetables and the women flowers, though not as a rule.

Visitors who drive in from the South Klondike Highway are greeted by greenery. NPS photo/A. Lattka.

In 1916, as tourism took hold in Alaska, the town’s dentist and newspaper editor, Dr. L.S. Keller, coined the nickname “Garden City of Alaska” to increase tourist appeal. It beat other candidates, including “the Key City,” “the Lynn Canal City,” “Gateway to the Golden Interior,” “The Garden Spot” and “Summer Resort of Alaska.”

Wars and revivals

When the United States entered the First World War, Skagway replaced flower gardens with vegetable gardens, and a local paper noted that the plebeian potato took the place of the aristocratic dahlia. Afterward flowers returned. Dahlias, sweet peas, pansies and nasturtiums did best, and the Blanchard family’s garden was a tourist “must-see” between the wars. In 1929 the Blanchards grew the world’s largest dahlia. Charley Walker, who covered the Arctic Brotherhood building’s face with 10,000 sticks of driftwood, sold bouquets to tourists as they walked into town and was known as the most northern florist in the world; both gardens were on Martin Itjen’s streetcar tours. Vegetables thrived as well: Henry Clark, the rhubarb king, also had acres of cabbages, and a weekly truck or cart took produce from him and two others to residents who froze or canned it for winter.

In the Second World War, with troops housed in Skagway, garden plots became building foundations, topsoil was destroyed and trees bulldozed. Tourists were barred, and many of the best gardeners left or died. After tourism resumed, growers did not advertise their gardens as before, and gardening faded by the early 1960s as retiring gardeners were not replaced. A first Skagway Garden Club formed briefly in 1961.

In the early 1980s businesswoman Charlotte Jewell, supported by Councilwoman Suzanne Hartson, revived interest, and the Skagway Garden Club re-formed to beautify public places with flowers and trees. It planted fifty mountain ash trees along the road to the ferry terminal, paid for with $10,000 in donations from citizens and the city, and “Mountain Ash Row” was dedicated on July 4, 1987. The club also gave free soil to homes along State and Main.

A popular place for Skagway residents to get their hands dirty in summer. NPS photo/K. Howard.

Today there is a community garden of raised beds, tools and a large compost pile north of the Skagway City School ball fields, flower sales and businesses that support home gardens are advertised around town, and the National Park Service adorns Broadway with a native plant garden designed and cultivated by local children.

Sources

• National Park Service, Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, Gardening in Skagway; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Photographs from private collections are left out.