Poorly Researched Local History: Star On The Mountain

It is well-known that Alaska was discovered during the American Civil War by Confederate Naval Captain Jasper Fairbanks, who in April of 1863 led a grand but ultimately fatal attempt to attack the Union stronghold of Milwaukee by sea. Sailing an aging sloop-of-war ship confiscated from the Mexican navy, Fairbanks and his squad of 78 rebel sailors set off into the Pacific Ocean, departing Fort Alcatraz with hopes of circumventing the northern and western extents of Canada - an ambitious path that would have covered nearly 9,000 miles. They planned to ultimately approach Milwaukee via Lake Michigan, storming the city's shores with intent to cripple its waterfront Grinding District, where all Union bayonets were sent for their regular sharpenings.

At its onset, success of the mission was believed to hinge on one of the South's greatest gambles of the war: the far-fetched hope of entering the Great Lakes through an unconfirmed Canadian waterway, thought to extend inland through Ontario from Hudson Bay, which Fairbanks and General Robert E. Lee (close friends from their years as roommates at the University of South Florida Military Academy) both falsely believed to exist. Instead, the ill-fated expedition ended far more prematurely, when the fragile vessel sustained irreparable damage after running aground on an unmapped (and then-unknown) peninsula extending from the western edge of the Canadian Yukon territories. The incident occurred near the present-day location of Anchorage, miring Fairbanks and his crew on the shores of the land that would eventually become the 49th U.S. state.

Captain Fairbanks's North American map, recovered from the Alaskan crash site that doomed the ill-fated Milwaukee siege, overlaid with his intended and actual (as approximated from his log) routes.

It is lesser known, however, that Captain Fairbanks was also the first to observe and document the original incarnation of the famous star that overlooks Anchorage from the Chugach Mountains. Now composed of electric bulbs that illuminate the city's northeast sky each winter, the star formation was originally a naturally occurring meadow amongst surrounding mountainside trees.

During the five weeks between the wreck and his eventual death, Fairbanks wrote of the land where he and all but six of his men would eventually perish:

This wild newfound coast land has now dis-abled our sea craft, taken the lives of eleven of our crew, and cursed another two dozen with a most ruinous bout of moose poisoning. Yet it constitutes, truly, sights of God's glory to behold! Daylight at all hours and mountains on all sides.   ...   An easterly peak sports a most unusual clearing of vegetation, approximating shape of a five-pointed star, as though the forest's midsection were blasted by a 12-pounder's shell - much as has befallen my dear brother Cyrus at Antietam, I construe from his letters.

Sadly, the original natural feature was a casualty of the extensive mountainside tree clearings of several Chugach peaks in the mid-1930s, when all vegetation was razed to make space for the U.S. Army Air Corps's experimentations with steeply inclined aircraft landing strips. These proved largely unsuccessful, and the project was discontinued in 1938 after three years of test-flights, nearly all of which ended in fatal crashes. After brief use as a Near-Vertical Arctic Farming (NVAF) site during the early 1940s, the land was abandoned to return to natural growth after the war; for reasons never conclusively determined, the star-shaped meadow did not reappear.

In 1968, Anchorage municipal assembly member Rick Nesson, a military history enthusiast, spearheaded an effort to reintroduce the star to the city's skyline, both as homage to the original shape observed by Captain Fairbanks and as tribute to the hundreds of the test pilots killed on the site (a fitting symbol, reminiscent of the Army Air Corps's roundel insignia). The project was completed and officially introduced to Anchorage residents with a modest dedication ceremony in October of 1969.

Each year, the star's 20,000+ bulbs are illuminated sequentially, one per minute, beginning at midnight on December 7 and concluding two weeks later with an extravagant fireworks show and outdoor music festival on the winter solstice, headlined in past years by popular rock acts including U2 (1995) and Dishwalla (2001). The star goes dark for the summer each year on the fifth Tuesday of May, except for years when May has only four Tuesdays, in which case the star is left illuminated and that year's winter lighting ceremony is forgone.

For a brief time during the borough's financial challenges of the early 1980s, the star and its operation were leased to various local commercial enterprises for the purposes of advertising, producing dozens of variations to the star's iconic white glow. Memorable versions included the two-year run of a blue and green bulb scheme promoting the Anchorage Admirals (an ABA basketball franchise which later relocated to California, eventually becoming the Sacramento Kings) and a collection of distasteful modifications made during its short-lived but regrettable sponsorship by a local gentlemen's club/shooting range.

Use of the landmark for advertising was discontinued when the borough permanently reclaimed operation of the star in 1988 and granted its inclusion on the state registry of historic places. Funding from this designation has enabled the construction of many of the star's modern amenities, including a unique inclined elevator, used to access the site for tours, and the observation deck, which offers one of the area's best views of the recently renovated state capitol building in downtown Anchorage.

Poorly Researched Local History is a recurring feature in which an Anchorage landmark is examined through a lens of outright lies and fake anecdotes that I totally just made up right now.