I’ve Googled eight ways for Sunday, and can’t seem to find the answer to this anywhere. I also searched for the US Census Bureau, and none of the hits even came close to finding this information.
Is it perhaps because it was a Territory back then and no census was taken?
This is the first big failure of Google in a long time, unless I am doing something wrong.
According to here (PDF, page 10): http://labor.alaska.gov/research/census/histpdfs/1950inhab.pdf
3,455 in 1939 and 5,771 in 1950. I’m not sure why that isn’t findable through the actual census department sites.
The closest I found was from here "Alaska at war 1941-1945" Which put the population in 1940 at about 12000
Wikipedia gives 3,455 in 1940 and 5,771 in 1950, but I don’t see any citations for those numbers.
Interesting discrepancy between the one source giving 5771 and the other around 12,000. I was up there from '45-'47, and am pretty sure it could not be anywhere near the later figure.
I found similar: 5600 in 1940, and 11,700 in 1950.Since the census is done only every ten years, I doubt there will be much different in general searches, unless someone has written books about that specific area at that specific time. Which is likely probable; just gotta find them.
ETA: Same article puts Alaska’s total population in 1950 as being 138,000, but a good 26000 were military. Gotta remember all kinds of fun war things, not to mention gold-digging things, were happening at the time, bringing in lots of passers-through. Especially for Fairbanks; the fort was built there right about that time, I think.
They may have been including Eielson AFB and Fort Wainright, but 12,000 is way out of whack.
Agree. BTW, back in '45, it was Ladd Field.
Back then Fairbanks was a pretty wild and woolly place, and really a lot of fun, especially when the trappers came back from the bush in the Spring and spent most of the summer getting wildly drunk.
I am impressed looking at the pictures of today’s streets with the biig modern buildings. Back then there were some hotels and maybe an office building or two, but on the main drag, just about every other business was a bar.
One bar, whose name I forgot, is famous for having a crutch hanging on the wall behind the bar. Somebody came limping in on crutches, and after a long time drinking, walked out without it and never returned.
Prostitution was legal, and Fourth St was a row of whorehouses. They were off limits for military, but that did not make much difference.
The ratio of men to women was somewhere around 10 to 1.
It may still be, but then Alaskans refereed to the Territory as “The Last Frontier,” and I think it really was.
The first winter I was up there was the coldest in several years. My favorite memory was a weather forecast on the radio. After several weeks of temps down in the minus 50s and 60s, the announcer said, “Good news, it has finally warmed up to 40.below”
Fairbanks has retained some of that character. The oil boom of the 70s brought the grifters and prostitutes back in force, and there was a lot of money to be made. Politically, FBX is an oddity, and always surprises you just when you think you’ve got it figured out. I grew up in Anchorage, but went to college for a couple of years in Fairbanks. It got down to -62F that first winter, with ice fog so thick you literally could not see your hand at the end of your outstretched arm. What a place.
The 1940 and 1950 censuses aren’t going to be much help for a lot of west coast cities in that era. Even though Fairbanks was fairly far inland, various boom-bust cycles caused wild population swings.
Take Vanport, OR. Started growing in 1943, by the end of WWII was at 40,000 and the 2nd largest city in Oregon, dropped to less than half that once the war boom was over and then wiped out on May 30, 1948.
The effects of WWII on west coast demographics is astonishing, even far off Fairbanks would not have been immune.
Oh yeah, I forgot about ice fog. The amazing thing was to see from the air. It looked exactly like a white cup turned upside down over the city.
Whatta place indeed. 
Remember square tires? Gelled gasoline?
Heh, it was amazing that people could actually acclimate to these conditions.
On Ladd Field, to have any hope of getting the plane engines to start, they used to cover the cowlings with canvas, and underneath keep a blow torch burning all night. Even then…
I meant to ask, when you were up there, did they still have the lottery on when the ice would break up on the Chena?
Yep, except it’s on the Tenana River.
I got within 18 hours of break-up once when I was living in Anchorage.
It’s “Tanana River” (pronounced tah’-na-naw) and “Nenana River” (pronounced nee-nah’-na). People confuse the spelling all the time.
Well, I only lived there 7 years. Not nearly enough time to master all the Native spellings. :smack:
Because Alaska was not a US state until 1959. The first count of Alaska made by the US Census Bureau was in 1960.
Mostly in the Fairbanks cemetery, I would have thought.
[Come on, somebody had to.]
Uh, did you look at that report? It is the 1950 Census Bureau data for Alaska.
The census bureau even did a count in 1910, which would have been the first census year after the gold rush: http://labor.alaska.gov/research/census/histpdfs/1910aksup.pdf
You have to have a census count before you can become a state, if for no other reason than to make sure you are over the population threshold.