Cemetery in proposed highway corridor may contain cadavers

By Soren Wuerth

Turnagain News

A view from a possible grave site bluff overlooks Seward Highway and location of proposed interchange.

For nearly sixty years Merle Akers has kept mum about a cemetery on a bluff above Old Girdwood. 

“Now don’t go tromping around out there,” he said recently, after giving away his secret. 

Akers, 87, skied in Girdwood in the 60s, helped a friend build a cabin here and became a part of the town’s small community. He also caught wind of a cemetery.

“Most of us knew there were graves up there,” Akers said. “The highway department was going to change the road going through downtown Girdwood and put in the abutment that exists to this day.”

He visited the graves and worried they might be desecrated. The cemetery extended across present-day Alyeska Highway along a bluff that today overlooks the planning area for the Department of Transportation’s proposed intersection project.

“I saw a notice in the paper that the highway might be changed, so I went back and said, ‘I wonder what will happen to those graves.'”

What appears to be a WWI or WWII military cot crumpled near depression.

A project manager with the Department of Transportation, Christina Huber, referred questions to a spokesperson who said he is looking into whether DOT has yet conducted a cultural survey. 

“The [intersection] project has gotten a lot of attention and is stirring up a lot of emotions,” Huber said.

Akers, a retired Alaska Railroad worker, called old friends and wrote municipal and state agencies. 

Old rusted cans litter the bluff not far from Alyeska Highway

“I didn’t get any information, then I ran into Tommy O’Malley,” he said. “Tom went to Hope and did this or that.”

O’Malley, a local artist, told Akers that the genealogy society in Hope had also documented graves in lower Girdwood. It was rumored bodies were moved to Sunrise and Hope for internment, but O’Malley found that was not the case.

“The people in Sunrise keep really good records and they know exactly who is buried in the graveyard and there hasn’t been anyone buried there since the 1920s,” he said. He went to Hope to look for any remains from Girdwood, but that search also failed to yield results. 

Then he learned that Seward’s cemetery had a set of re-buried Girdwood remains dating to 1966. “Because one body did show up, it shows there was a cemetery here,” he said. 

The bodies were likely never exhumed from the cemetery, O’Malley said. Then came the 1964 earthquake and the new Alyeska highway. 

“Maybe they bulldozed it,” he said. “But if there are bodies discovered there they can be buried in our [future] cemetery.” 

An abandoned car, "possibly a Chevy Coup from the 1940s-50s", according to archaeological firm TNSDS.

In December of 2021, an archeological survey conducted for the Anchorage Historic Preservation Commission found surface depressions near the remnants of an old wagon road that followed Turnagain Arm to Anchorage. 

“This survey area contains a cultural site previously identified by the community; however, the site has not been documented … and no previous investigation reports have been made available for it,” the report states. Its authors, who did not test the pits, concluded the depression could be natural or human-made. 

Nearby one depression is the frame of a cot, crumpled, its hinged, bony boards poking from the ground.

“These have the shape and dimensions of graves,” said Jake Ramsay. Ramsay and his colleague Heather Hall, archaeologists for the Forest Service, plan to investigate the area in coming weeks with the help of a cadaver-sniffing dog and ground-penetrating radar, all of which requires a permit as the site is on state land.

The Forest Service is leasing its property and is in the process of filing for a land transfer, Hall said. Determining the history is part of that process.

The old wagon road toward Anchorage along a bluff.

The cemetery would have been the largest in Turnagain Arm at the time, Ramsay said. He and Hall both said they thought some of the gravesmay have been taken to Sunrise and Hope for reburial.

Dorothy Hibbs, 100, who was postmaster in Girdwood from 1954-1976, said she knew about the cemetery and thinks most of it was destroyed when Alyeska Highway was built. When she lived in Girdwood she heard that someone had tried to dig up a grave. 

For his part, Akers thinks there may be more people buried on the bluff. 

“I decided to make this more public,” he said “We’re getting old. There are six people alive and kicking and most of them knew about it. They don’t remember who the names on the graves were, but they saw grave markers there one time or another.”

He said the markers were made of wood and guessed they were buried in the early 1900s. Girdwood had a bigger population than Anchorage at one point and when someone died in Girdwood (or Glacier City, as it was then known) were buried locally since there was no road to Anchorage.”

“I’m too old now to go out there,” Akers said from his home in Anchorage. “But I know what I saw. I hesitated to bring this up, but once you get going on a new highway… well, that area should be protected,” he said.