The town's odd name comes from a boom that went bust. In the 1890s a gold-rush promoter named Homer Pennock landed on the spit with grand plans for coal mining, built a settlement, and left his first name on the place when the venture collapsed. The coal never paid, but the fish did. Through the early twentieth century Homer grew slowly as a fishing and homesteading outpost at the end of the trail, a hardscrabble frontier town on a spectacular bay, far from anywhere and content to be. The road only reached Homer in 1950, when the Sterling Highway finally tied the town to the rest of the Kenai Peninsula and the world beyond.
Homer was reshaped, literally, by the sea floor. The 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake — the most powerful ever recorded in North America — dropped the Homer Spit several feet, flooding parts of it and forcing the town to rebuild the harbor and the road that run its length today. As with so much of Alaska, the response was practical and stubborn: Homer rebuilt the Spit better, and went back to fishing. The shape of the modern town owes as much to that rebuilding as to anything Pennock ever planned.
Why People Visit Homer
Homer offers Alaska at its most scenic and approachable — a working fishing port and arts town on one of the most beautiful bays in the state. Visitors come for the halibut charters, the Spit, and the wildlife and water excursions, and stay for the galleries, beaches, and unhurried end-of-the-road feel. From the harbor docks to the mountains across the bay, it rewards a slow few days. It is wild, creative, and welcoming in every season on Kachemak Bay.
