In 1935, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration created an experimental farming community known as the Matanuska Valley Colony as part of the New Deal resettlement plan.[1] Situated in the Matanuska Valley, about 45 miles northeast of Anchorage, Alaska, the colony was settled by 203 families from Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.[2] The colony project cost about $5,000,000 and, after five years, over half of the original colonists had left the valley. By 1965, only 20 of the first families were still farming the valley.[3]