North Pole, Alaska
Based on Wikipedia: North Pole, Alaska
The Town That Bet on Santa
In 1952, a real estate development company bought a homestead in interior Alaska and renamed it North Pole. Their reasoning was delightfully straightforward: if they called it North Pole, surely some toy manufacturer would want to put "Made at the North Pole" on their products. No toy factory ever came. But something stranger happened instead—the town became North Pole anyway.
Today, the street lights are shaped like candy canes. The streets have names like Santa Claus Lane, Snowman Lane, and Kris Kringle Drive. The fire trucks are red and the police cars are green and white. There's a roller derby league called the North Pole Babes in Toyland, whose skaters compete under Christmas-themed names.
And yes, there's a man named Santa Claus on the city council.
Seventeen Hundred Miles Off
The geographic North Pole—that point where all the lines of longitude converge at the top of the Earth, where compasses spin in confusion and every direction is south—sits about seventeen hundred miles away from this little Alaskan city. North Pole, Alaska isn't even above the Arctic Circle. It's a hundred twenty-five miles south of that imaginary line.
The city lies just thirteen miles southeast of Fairbanks, deep in the Alaskan interior. If you're driving the Richardson Highway from Fairbanks toward Valdez, you'll pass right through it. The location is significant for a different reason than Christmas magic: it's landlocked, hemmed in by mountain ranges that block any moderating influence from the ocean.
This makes for extraordinary temperature swings.
In January 1975, the temperature dropped to negative sixty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. In June 1969, it hit ninety-five. That's a spread of one hundred sixty-two degrees between the coldest and hottest days ever recorded there. The subarctic climate means about two hundred forty nights a year drop below freezing. For nearly a third of the year, the nighttime low stays below zero.
The Homesteaders
Before there was Christmas kitsch, there was the Davis family. Bon V. and Bernice Davis homesteaded the land in 1944, during the closing years of World War II. The Alaska Railroad built a siding on their property as part of a branch line running to Eielson Air Force Base, and they called the siding Davis. The little settlement that grew up around it took the same name.
Their son, T. Neil Davis, later wrote a fictionalized account of that homesteading life called Battling Against Success. The title suggests something about the contradictions of trying to build a life in one of the most challenging environments on Earth while the modern world kept encroaching.
Eight years after the Davises staked their claim, the Dahl and Gaske Development Company bought them out. They subdivided the land and bestowed upon it its famous name, hoping capitalism and whimsy might intersect in profitable ways.
The Incorporation
North Pole became an official city on January 15, 1953, carved from portions of the Davis homestead and the adjacent property of James Ford. Ford became the first mayor. Everett Dahl—one half of the company that invented the place—sat on the first city council.
So did Conrad B. Miller, who had arrived in Fairbanks in 1949 and opened a trading post along the highway in 1952. That trading post evolved into the Santa Claus House, which today stands as North Pole's biggest attraction. For almost twenty years, it also served as the town's post office.
Another family, the Cunninghams, ran a competing trading post. Between these two businesses, North Pole's economy survived through the 1960s and into the 1970s. Then the state rebuilt the Richardson Highway as a four-lane road, and in doing so bypassed what had effectively been downtown North Pole. The old Davis Subdivision suddenly found itself on a road to nowhere.
Oil, Then No Oil
The Trans-Alaska Pipeline changed everything about Alaska when it was completed in 1977. That same year, the Earth Resources refinery began operations in North Pole. Feeder pipelines connected it to the main artery carrying crude oil from Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic coast eight hundred miles south to the port at Valdez.
For decades, the refinery—later operated by Flint Hills Resources, a subsidiary of Koch Industries—was a major source of jet fuel for Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. Tanker cars moved constantly on the Alaska Railroad, entering and leaving the refinery, frequently cutting the city in half.
The refinery was the town's major industry aside from tourism. Then came the discovery of sulfolane in the groundwater.
Sulfolane is an industrial solvent, colorless and odorless, used in petroleum refining to extract certain compounds from crude oil. It doesn't belong in drinking water. By 2014, the contamination had spread far enough and the cleanup costs had mounted high enough that Koch Industries closed the refinery entirely. Americans for Prosperity, a political organization also funded by the Koch brothers, had been running advertisements in Alaska that year. They pulled the ad campaign shortly after the closure was announced.
The Letters
Every year before Christmas, the post office in North Pole receives hundreds of thousands of letters addressed to Santa Claus. Children from around the world send their wishes to 1 Santa Claus Lane, North Pole, Alaska. The town promotes its ZIP code—99705—as Santa's own.
Thousands more letters arrive not for Santa but for the postmark. People send their Christmas cards to North Pole with instructions to re-mail them, so that their holiday greetings will arrive bearing that magical origin: North Pole, Alaska.
A community volunteer program responds to the letters addressed to Santa. It's one of those small civic efforts that exists somewhere between public service and performance art, keeping alive a fiction that has taken on its own peculiar reality.
The Santa Claus House
The trading post that Conrad Miller opened in 1952 is now a substantial tourist attraction. Outside stands what is billed as the world's largest fiberglass statue of Santa Claus. A small group of domesticated reindeer live on the property—not flying reindeer, of course, just the regular caribou subspecies that have been herded by humans across the Arctic for thousands of years, but with appropriately festive associations.
The Santa Claus House is the primary reason tourists driving between Fairbanks and points south stop in North Pole. It's not subtle about what it's selling. But there's something almost admirable about the commitment to the bit—a town that named itself after a marketing gimmick and then spent seventy years actually becoming the thing it pretended to be.
Real Estate and Reality
North Pole has some of the least expensive residential real estate in Alaska. In 2014, the median home price was just over two hundred eleven thousand dollars, which sounds like a lot until you consider that Alaska has some of the highest housing costs in the United States.
The population has never been large. The city first appeared in the 1960 census with a reported population of 615, though that number was later revised down to 358. By 2000, it had grown to 1,570. The 2020 census counted 2,243 people.
It's a small place. The city covers just over four square miles, almost all of it land. The Tanana River lies to the south and east, but access isn't easy—an extensive system of levees stands between the city and the water. Beaver Springs Slough meanders through the heart of town, emptying into Chena Slough.
The ZIP Code's Reach
The 99705 ZIP code extends well beyond the city limits. It stretches between Fort Wainwright and Eielson Air Force Base, and between the Chena River and the Tanana River. This area includes Badger, a census-designated place that spans the subdivisions connecting Fairbanks to North Pole, and Moose Creek.
North Pole is the recommended city name for the entire ZIP code. So when you send a letter to 99705, the post office wants you to address it to North Pole, Alaska, even if the recipient lives in Badger or somewhere else within that postal territory.
A Darker Chapter
On April 22, 2006, police arrested several students at North Pole Middle School for allegedly plotting a school shooting. The incident attracted the attention of Jon Ronson, a British journalist known for his explorations of fringe American subcultures. He made a documentary called Death in Santaland about the town and the foiled plot. It broadcast on the British television channel More 4 in 2007.
Ronson later wrote about his time in North Pole in his book Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries, documenting his interviews with residents trying to reconcile the darkness of the plot with the relentless cheerfulness of their surroundings.
Small-Town Politics
The city government has had what might charitably be called a colorful history. A past mayor, Jeff Jacobson, drew criticism for holding down his full-time mayor's position while simultaneously working full-time as a teacher at North Pole Middle School.
In 2004, Jacobson sent a lump of coal to United States Senator John McCain. The Senator had made comments suggesting that North Pole's request for federal funding for a recreation project was pork barrel spending—government money directed to a local project more for political benefit than public need. McCain had asked, essentially, why the town's "elves" needed the money. Jacobson took the joke and weaponized it, sending actual coal to the Senator's office.
Today, the city council consists of six members serving staggered three-year terms, with elections each October. As of 2022, one of those council members is a man who legally changed his name to Santa Claus. Born Thomas Patrick O'Connor in 1947, he has served as mayor pro tem and even ran for Congress. He bears a striking resemblance to the legendary figure and has committed fully to the role.
Political Leanings
North Pole is the most Republican-leaning area in the Fairbanks North Star Borough. In the 2008 presidential election, the district encompassing North Pole gave John McCain seventy-eight percent of its votes. Barack Obama received less than twenty percent. Similar margins have held in subsequent elections.
There's something worth noting here about the relationship between rural Alaska and the Republican Party, though it's more complicated than simple red-state stereotypes. Alaska has a strong libertarian streak—people who moved to the edge of the continent often did so precisely because they wanted to be left alone. The politics follow from the geography.
Schools and Community
North Pole Elementary School, North Pole Middle School, and North Pole High School all sit within the city limits. They're part of the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District. The middle and high schools share an attendance area with several other elementary schools: Midnight Sun Elementary, Ticasuk Brown Elementary, and Two Rivers Elementary.
The schools have produced some notable alumni. Daryn Colledge, who played guard in the National Football League, grew up in North Pole and graduated from the high school. Pheonix Copley, a goaltender who has played for the Los Angeles Kings and Washington Capitals, also comes from North Pole.
The Painter Who Found His Mountains
Bob Ross—the soft-spoken painter with the afro who taught millions of Americans that there are no mistakes, only happy little accidents—lived in North Pole for over a decade. He mentioned it numerous times during his television show The Joy of Painting, which ran from 1983 to 1994.
Ross had served in the United States Air Force and was stationed at Eielson Air Force Base, just down the road from North Pole. He fell in love with the Alaskan landscape—the mountains, the dramatic skies, the interplay of light and snow. Those "happy little trees" and misty mountain peaks that became his signature? Many of them first appeared to him in the interior of Alaska, along the road between Fairbanks and the place that calls itself the North Pole.
He said the scenery surrounding the town was of great inspiration for his work. When you watch those old episodes and see him conjuring snow-capped peaks from a blank canvas, you're watching a man paint from memory, remembering a place where temperatures could swing a hundred and sixty degrees and the sun barely set in summer and barely rose in winter.
The Miller Brothers
Terry Miller entered politics at the age of twenty, serving on the first Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly. He eventually became president of the Alaska Senate and served as Lieutenant Governor of Alaska from 1978 to 1982 under Governor Jay Hammond. He died in 1989 at just forty-seven years old.
His brother, Mike W. Miller, followed him into politics, serving eighteen years in the Alaska Legislature and later as Commissioner of Administration under Governor Frank Murkowski.
Gene Therriault succeeded Mike Miller in both the Alaska House of Representatives and the Alaska Senate. He too eventually served as president of the Alaska Senate. There's something almost dynastic about it—a small town producing a disproportionate number of state political leaders, passing positions from one to another like a relay baton.
Pop Culture Footnotes
In the Marvel Comics series New Avengers, North Pole was depicted as destroyed during the Collective story arc in the spring of 2006. Comic book geography has always been flexible, but there's something fitting about a town that exists as much in imagination as in reality being destroyed in a fictional universe.
The ABC reality show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition built a house for a local family over one week in July 2006. The episode served as the season premiere and kicked off the show's plan to rebuild a home in each state. North Pole got to represent Alaska.
In 2007, the artist David Choe—who would later become famous for accepting stock instead of cash as payment for painting murals at Facebook's early offices, stock that made him worth hundreds of millions of dollars—made North Pole his final destination in the second season of his show Thumbs Up!, which documented his attempts to hitchhike across America.
The Church Down the Street
Less than a mile from the Santa Claus House, along St. Nicholas Drive, stands St. Nicholas Church. It's a quiet, unassuming building, a stark contrast to the sparkle and shine of the tourist attraction up the road.
There's something almost too perfect about the coincidence—a Catholic church dedicated to the actual Saint Nicholas, the fourth-century Greek bishop whose generosity inspired the Santa Claus legend, sitting in a town that has devoted itself entirely to the secular, commercialized version of that same figure. The original Nicholas of Myra was known for secretly giving gifts to those in need. The town named for the myth he became is known for selling gifts to tourists.
They share a street named after the saint. One trades in the spiritual, the other in the spectacular. Both, in their own way, are keeping something alive.
What North Pole Is
North Pole, Alaska is not the North Pole. Everyone knows this. The town knows this. The tourists know this. The children who send letters know this, at least on some level, even as they address their envelopes to 1 Santa Claus Lane.
But it is a place where about two thousand people live real lives in an extreme climate, where the temperature can plunge to levels that kill exposed flesh in minutes, where the sun barely rises for months and then barely sets for months more. They work and raise children and argue about local politics and maintain schools and deal with contaminated groundwater from a closed refinery.
And they do all of this in a town where the street lights are candy canes and the police cars are green and one of the city council members is legally named Santa Claus.
In 1952, some developers thought they could attract a toy factory by naming a place North Pole. The toy factory never came. But something else did—a commitment to a story, maintained for over seventy years, until the story became the truth. North Pole is the North Pole now, not because of where it sits on a map, but because it decided to be, and then kept deciding, every day, for seven decades.
That might be the most interesting thing about it. Not the candy cane street lights or the letter-answering program or even the man named Santa Claus serving on the city council. It's the persistence of it. The refusal to let the joke end. The transformation of a marketing gimmick into an identity.
Seventeen hundred miles from the actual pole, in a place where Bob Ross found his mountains and the groundwater carries industrial solvents and the temperature swings are among the most extreme anywhere humans live, a small city just keeps being North Pole.