Fairbanks, Alaska
AA-2026-C0728B
On the image
Someone in the Fairbanks town fathers' office decided that a highway terminus needed perspective, so they bolted a second sign on top of the mileage post and had it calculate the distance to Bombay, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Capetown. The logic was sound in a chamber-of-commerce way: if you have just driven 1,523 miles of gravel and frost heaves to get here, you deserve to know you are still 8,379 miles from Bombay, so you might as well be philosophical about it.
Two women pause near a parked saloon at the base of the post, unremarkable in cardigans, doing what everyone did at the sign, which was stand near it briefly and then move along. The Alaska Highway had by then been open to civilian traffic for about two decades, converting a wartime military supply road into a tourist rite of passage, and Fairbanks made sure every arriving motorist got a photograph proving it.
Behind them a plain modern office block and a radio tower assert that Fairbanks intended to be taken seriously as a city and not just a frontier punchline, even while the sign in front insisted on measuring itself against the far side of the planet.
The historian's note
The marker recorded here stands at Mile 1523, historically reckoned as the terminus of the Alaska Highway, also called the Alcan, at Fairbanks, Alaska. The highway was built in 1942 as a wartime overland supply route to Alaska and opened to public travel after the war, becoming by the 1960s a fixture of North American road-trip tourism.
Comparative-distance signage of this kind, listing mileage to distant world cities, was a common civic gesture at highway termini and border points during this era, meant to dramatise remoteness for arriving tourists rather than serve any practical navigational purpose.
The surrounding buildings reflect Fairbanks's postwar growth as a regional hub for oil, military, and transportation interests in interior Alaska during the 1960s.
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Mile 1523 Alaska Highway Terminus Sign, Fairbanks, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-C0728B. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/mile-1523-alaska-highway-terminus-sign-fairbanks-1960s.
@misc{aaAA2026C0728B,
title = {Mile 1523 Alaska Highway Terminus Sign, Fairbanks, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-C0728B},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/mile-1523-alaska-highway-terminus-sign-fairbanks-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Mile 1523 Alaska Highway Terminus Sign, Fairbanks, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-C0728B UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/mile-1523-alaska-highway-terminus-sign-fairbanks-1960s ER -
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