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Fairbanks outlasted the gold by becoming the hub of the Interior. The Alaska Railroad reached town in 1923, when President Warren Harding drove a golden spike at nearby Nenana, tying Fairbanks to the coast and the rest of the territory. Six years before that, in 1917, the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines had been founded on a ridge above the river — the seed of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, now a major northern research center. In the 1940s the military arrived in force, and the airfields that became Fort Wainwright and Eielson made Fairbanks a strategic outpost of the Far North. Each wave left the town a little more permanent.
What it brought was gold. On July 22, 1902, an Italian prospector named Felix Pedro — born Felice Pedroni — struck pay dirt in the creeks north of Barnette's post, and word raced through the North. Barnette sent his employee Jujiro Wada to carry the news to the miners of Dawson, and the stampede was on; by 1903 hundreds of prospectors had poured into the Tanana Valley and a town was rising on the Chena. Barnette had already chosen the name: at the urging of Judge James Wickersham, he called the place Fairbanks, after Charles W. Fairbanks, a powerful Indiana senator who would soon become vice president under Theodore Roosevelt. The senator never visited, but his name stuck to the gold camp for good.
Why People Visit Fairbanks
Visitors come to Fairbanks for the aurora — the city's spot under the auroral oval is hard to beat — and stay for the layered Interior story: gold dredges and frontier cabins, a northern university and big-sky wilderness in every direction. It is the gateway to Denali and the Arctic, with hot springs and ice art for the winter and the Midnight Sun for the summer. Equal parts gold-rush heritage and far-north spectacle, Fairbanks rewards anyone drawn to the heart of Alaska.
