When favorable engineering reports for a railroad sparked interest in the present-day Anchorage area, thousands flocked here in 1915 hoping to find work.

Tent City

Even before President Wilson approved this route for the railroad in April, 1915, a city of tents blossomed in the creek bottom just north of this spot. The residents of Tent City wanted land. U.S. General Land Office surveyors chose to put the new town here on the bluff to make room for railroad yards below. They worked quickly beginning with survey points set three years earlier when an initial survey was completed from Seward to the Matanuska Valley. The new town site had 121 blocks with about 1400 lots. You are now standing on part of original Block 18.

On July 10, 1915, the town lots were sold at a U.S. General Land Office auction held just over the hill at the foot of C Street. The first lot sold for $825. Anchorage grew rapidly. Additional surveys helped establish orderly settlement in the surrounding area, including homesteads which provided farm produce for the new community.

The original homesteads, now withing Anchorage, have been subdivided, becoming business and residential areas. Most of Anchorage's streets follow the north-south and east-west rectangular grid laid out by those original surveyors. The Bureau of Land Management, which inherited the survey legacy of the General Land Office in 1946, is extending the rectangular grid to the entire State of Alaska, defining Native and State lands as well as Federal land boundaries.

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- Anchorage Borough Alaska

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