Building The Alcan In Record Time: Black History Month

History Of Our Highways 

BUILDING THE ALCAN HIGHWAY 

Map of the Alaska-Canada Highway in 2025. (Google Maps) 

 Black Soldiers Helped Complete The Alaska Highway Under Segregated Conditions In 1942 

The 1,700 mile long Alaska Highway, which starts in Dawson Creek in British Columbia and ends  in Delta Junction, Alaska, was built in only 8 months in 1942. 

The highway was approved by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in April, 1942, and construction began one month later, in March. It was built by over 10,000 soldiers. Thirty men died in the process. 

The highway was built after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, when the country felt it was urgent to be connected by road to Alaska, which was then a territory. 

There were eight regiments assigned by the Army Corps of Engineers. Four were "white" and four were "black." 

Today, when it takes years to build bridges – for example at Denali Park, where a landslide is being bridged, or in Cooper Landing – the Alaska Highway was on a fast track that apparently can't be matched at this time. 

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The highway's construction is an enduring message about how the U.S. military treated black soldiers prior to World War II. Many of the black soldiers were from the South, and unused to cold weather. They were isolated in tents, away from towns and villages they passed by. The white soldiers were apparently given Quonset huts and worked under much better conditions. 

A hard-working, enormously competent bunch, the black work crews built the Alcan in much the same way that earlier work crews built the Richardson Highway: with hand saws, shovels and axes. They had to build bridges and culverts. Which they did – at a record pace. 

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The town of Delta Junction has long celebrated the construction of the Alcan, along with the farm town's status as the end of the road. 

But so (erroneously) did Fairbanks, which for many years had a sign up in town by the waterfront, claiming that the Alcan ended in Fairbanks instead of Delta Junction.

This past summer, Delta people took down their old "End of the Alcan" sign, which was rotting, and rebuilt it, erecting it by the time fall came. It looks exactly like the original. 

From Delta Junction, an extension of the highway came down the Tok Cutoff, and then to Anchorage, which at the time was not a big city at all. 

See stories from the Country Journal about the construction of the Alcan, and about what happened later, as local men pushed their way down what was to become the Glenn – to Anchorage. 

From The Journal Archives 

DELTA: THE END OF THE ALCAN 

TOURISTS AT THE NEW DELTA JUNCTION END OF THE HIGHWAY SIGN: JULY, 2024

Photo, Copper River Country Journal 

NEW END OF THE ALCAN SIGN IN DELTA: SEPTEMBER 19TH, 2024 

(Photo, Copper River Country Journal) 

Onward! How Copper Valley Men Scouted The Route To Anchorage - CLICK HERE 

(Google Maps)