![]() ![]() Reed struck one form of mother lode even before arriving there: on the sea voyage to the state, he met 16-year-old Pauline Hovey,a Munson, Ohio native who was traveling to Nome to manage a store her mother had invested in. In 1900, they sailed north to join other “stampeders” lured to Alaska by the Nome gold rush. ![]() Both contracted malaria, and while recuperating decided to try their luck in Alaska rather than return to Nebraska. In 1898, he and his brother volunteered to fight in the Spanish American War, and then served in the Philippine American War – the Philippine War of Independence. Raised in Council Bluffs, Iowa, he began his working life by moving to Nebraska for a job as an expressman ensuring safe passage of rail cargo. His engagement with Anchorage began after an already adventurous life. Reed contributed in many ways to the progress of the Alaskan city, and he also left rare film of its early days - in fact, of its birth and infancy. ![]() And the hardy souls who live through its harsh winters have a debt of gratitude to an industrious citizen of early Anchorage, Frank Ivan Reed, who lived from 1872 to 1944. It is Anchorage that has grown over the decades as a glacier should over millennia it is by far the largest Alaskan settlement with about 40 percent of the state’s 700,000 residents but its building did not begin until 1923. Today, after fluctuations over the years, Nome is about one-third that size. What swelled Nome from a small town in the state’s northwest to one of some 12,000 people was how readily prospectors found gold there: it literally scattered the beaches of Norton Sound on the Bering Sea. Reed and one pole of an Anchorage Light and Power transmission line completed in 1928 ![]()
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