Place Names, Part 2

A few more places with interesting origins.

Bean Creek — Supposedly, this stream, which empties into the Kenai River just below the outlet of Kenai Lake, was named in the mid-1930s when a group of men building the first Kenai River bridge was encamped along the creek and found themselves with nothing to eat but beans.



Resurrection Bay is a bay on the Kenai Peninsula. It received its name from Alexandr Baranov (Russian fur trader), who was forced to retreat into the bay during a bad storm in the Gulf of Alaska. When the storm settled it was Easter Sunday, so the bay and nearby Resurrection River were named in honor of it.




Resurrection Bay



Coldfoot primarily serves as a truck stop on the Dalton Highway from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay. It has a restaurant and a small number of overnight accommodations (converted pipeline construction camp quarters). Bus tours along the highway typically take two days with passengers spending the night in Coldfoot.














The town was originally a mining camp named Slate Creek, and around 1900 got its present name when prospectors going up the nearby Koyukuk River would get "cold feet" and turn around. In 1902 Coldfoot had two roadhouses, two stores, seven saloons, and a gambling house. A post office operated from 1902 to 1912, then reopened in 1984.

North Pole is a city 13 miles to the southeast of Fairbanks. Despite the name, the city is about 1,700 miles south of Earth's geographic North Pole.

The area that is now North Pole was homesteaded in 1944 by Bon V. Davis. A development company later purchased the Davis homestead, subdivided it, and named it North Pole, in hopes of attracting a toy manufacturer to the area. The City of North Pole was incorporated on January 15, 1953.












The city is a summertime attraction for tourists visiting nearby Fairbanks, and traveling to and from the Alaska Highway and Valdez. Its biggest attraction is a gift shop named Santa Claus House with the world's largest fiberglass statue of Santa Claus outside. Prior to Christmas each year, the USPS post office in North Pole receives hundreds of thousands of letters to Santa Claus, and thousands more from people wanting the town's postmark on their Christmas greeting cards to their families. It advertises the ZIP code 99705 as the ZIP code of Santa.










Christmas-themed streets in North Pole include Santa Claus Lane, St. Nicholas Drive, Snowman Lane, and Kris Kringle Drive. Street lights in the city are decorated in a candy cane motif, and many local businesses have similar decorations.