When my son moved from Anchorage to Palmer, Alaska, he bought a house next to a potato field, a house built in the 1930’s. His house got me curious about the early settlement of Palmer, and I was astonished to discover accounts of one of President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs that took two hundred and two families off relief and shipped them up to Alaska to become self-sufficient farmers. Fortunately, the Palmer Library had first-hand accounts from people who had moved up to Alaska as children with their families in the program, and the Alaskana Bookstore had several books about the early days of Palmer. I bought them all. I eventually had a banker’s box full of notes.
If I were writing a book about the colony, who should tell the story? I made up Terpsichore Johnson and her friends, to combine experiences of the real children who came up with their families in 1935. But I also included some of the real people, such as Pastor Bingle, Don Irwin, and Dr, Albrecht, who were credited with the survival of the colony.