How Anchorage, Alaska Got Its Name From a Spot Offshore

Anchorage, Alaska, is named for Knik Anchorage, the spot just offshore where ships anchored off the new railroad camp. Who picked the name is another story, and the federal record and the local historians don’t tell it the same way.

A tent camp at Ship Creek

Anchorage started in 1913 as a construction camp, the headquarters for the Alaska Railroad that was going to run from Seward to Fairbanks. That’s how the U.S. Geological Survey’s place-name record tells it. In those first years people called the place “Ship Creek” and “Woodrow.”

The name the town ended up with came from the water instead. The USGS says it “was derived from that of Knik Anchorage immediately off-shore from the new camp.” Donald Orth’s 1967 Dictionary of Alaska Place Names says the same and lists a few other names that floated around: Alaska City, Brownville and Port Woodrow.

The post office or the voters?

Here’s the disagreement. If you look up Anchorage in the federal place-names database today, you’ll read that once the Anchorage post office was set up, in 1914 or 1915, “the residents voted, August 15, 1915, to name the new town Anchorage.”

Orth’s 1967 version of the same entry is more careful. It doesn’t mention a vote. It just says that with the post office, “the present name soon became firmly established.”

Local historians tell a sharper story, and they have the vote counts. In her 1982 history Anchorage: Star of the North, Evangeline Atwood wrote that the name went on the ballot at the town’s school board election, set for August 2, 1915. The results: Alaska City 146, Lane 129, Anchorage 101, with Matanuska, Ship Creek, Winalaska, Terminal, Gateway and Homestead trailing behind. Lane was for Franklin Lane, the secretary of the interior. The new Chamber of Commerce then asked the Alaska Engineering Commission, the federal agency building the railroad, to change the name to Alaska City. According to Atwood, commissioners Edes and Mears talked it over with the leading businessmen and with Secretary Lane, and decided against the change. The Anchorage Daily News and Visit Anchorage, the city’s visitor site, tell the same story today.

Which version holds up?

On where the word comes from, there’s no fight. Everyone agrees it’s the offshore anchorage. On who chose it, Atwood’s numbers line up with Orth: the name came with the post office, the voters picked something else, and the government kept Anchorage anyway. The line in GNIS about residents voting for Anchorage is the odd one out. You’ll still hear that version, though. A 1987 municipal report on the town’s first schoolhouse repeats it, in an excerpt from a pioneer family’s memoir, and further on the same report reprints Atwood’s tally.

Woodrow didn’t make the cut, and neither did Alaska City. The town ended up named for a place to park a ship.

Sources & further reading

• U.S. Geological Survey, GNIS feature 1398242. Established in 1913 as the camp and headquarters of the Alaska Railroad; “early referred to as ‘Ship Creek’ and ‘Woodrow’”; “the residents voted, August 15, 1915, to name the new town Anchorage”; the name “derived from that of Knik Anchorage immediately off-shore from the new camp.”
• Donald J. Orth, Dictionary of Alaska Place Names (USGS, 1967), entry “Anchorage.” The same story without a vote: with the post office, “the present name soon became firmly established.” Variant names Alaska City, Brownville, Ship Creek, Port Woodrow and Woodrow.
• Evangeline Atwood, Anchorage: Star of the North (1982), as reprinted in the Municipality of Anchorage’s Pioneer Schoolhouse Restoration/Rehabilitation Phase I Report (1987). The August 2, 1915, ballot and its count (Alaska City 146, Lane 129, Anchorage 101); the Chamber of Commerce’s request to switch to Alaska City; Edes and Mears deciding against it. The same report also carries the older version in which voters chose Anchorage.
• Anchorage Daily News, “In 1915, Anchorage residents voted on an official name for the new city. The name Anchorage came in 3rd place” (2021). The 1915 vote and Anchorage’s third place.
• Anchorage Daily News, column on the Anchorage post office (September 12, 2021). The post office’s role in the name.
• Visit Anchorage, “The Naming of Anchorage: A Safe Place to Be.” Alaska City first and Lane second in the 1915 vote; Lane for Interior Secretary Franklin Lane; the Post Office name that stuck.