Dear Educator,

From the point of view of a middle grade child, Sweet Home Alaska describes a little-known program of the New Deal: the Palmer Colony, which took two hundred and two families off public relief rolls and moved them to Alaska to become self-sufficient farmers. In the administration’s eagerness to get results, they shipped up families a year earlier than originally planned. Not only were there no houses yet, but there were not even enough tents to go around. Colonists were thrown into the wilderness and back to the age of pioneers without cleared land, houses, school, or roads. As a testament to the resilience of youth, however, most of the old-timers interviewed about their childhoods in the colony remember it as a happy time.