Meet the Neighbors

Meet the Neighbors. There was a time when arriving passengers were greeted by a frontier community. , When the railroad station was built in 1922, on land then outside park boundaries, There was already a tiny settlement here. it came to be known as McKinley Park Station. The entrepreneurs who established it sought to profit from railroad construction and, in time park tourist. , In its day, the settlement boasted roadhouses, trading post, a post office, a fox farm, a school-- and, for a brief time, Park Headquarters. It where transient workers came to stay for a spell, miners came to wait out the winter, and locals and travelers came to dine on caribou and beans. Despite prohibition , moonshiner kept a few drinking hangouts supplied and at least one woman ran a brothel that found favor with railroad employees. , In 1932, the park's eastern boundary was extended to the Nenana River, brining the community within the park and generating more than a little resentment on the park of some landowners. Eventually the National Park Service was able to buy out all private holding. Today, time and fire have erased most of all the development, but you can still see traces of it from some entrance area trails. , The Enterprising Mr. Morino , Maurice Morino was the area's first permanent resident. He arrived around 1915, looking for gold and remained to homestead, building the roadhouse that would become the settlement's social hub. He and early park mangers often clashed, in part because his land would have made a good administrative base for the park. , From a Traveler's letter Home ,

"We are parked tonight at a typical Alaskan hotel - the road house… Downstairs they have a room with a monster stove. Back of that is a lunch counter. The meals are wonderful-- the supper is the best and cheapest we have had. Price $1 Steak, spuds, tomatoes soup, mince pie and lots of all of it." Samuel L. Diack writing from Morino's Roadhouse in 1923