The Surprising Story Behind America’s Most Unusual State Capital

State capitals are just one of America's many interesting geographic quirks. There are 50 state capitals and each of these cities has their own history and story for exactly why they got there. It can range from historical importance to central locations, but all of this just boils down to how the geography of the state affected development. There are plenty of weird and interesting capitals in the U.S. like Pierre, South Dakota, which is home to just about 14,000 people and is located 30 miles off the highway. Or Montpelier, Vermont, which really, when you think about it, is just a small town in the north part of the state. Anyway, a capital that I find much more interesting than any of the other examples across the country is Juneau, Alaska. Without knowing the history of the state, it makes no sense why the capital would be a seemingly random city right off a glacier on the southeastern coastline. But there are some really interesting reasons why it was chosen and why it's still there today, so in this video, I wanted to talk about those reasons. Before we get into the video though, I am so close to 100,000 subscribers my lifelong goal, so if you enjoy the content and want to learn more about geography topics like this, please consider subscribing to the channel because it'll help me out a ton right now. Thank you! So Juneau is in the southeastern region of Alaska along the Alexander Archipelago, which consists of over 1,100 islands. And there are a few specific quirks that you notice off the bat. First off, the population is 32,000, which you might not expect from such a remote place, but those government jobs bring a lot of importance to the city. The population was the highest it's ever been, but projections for 2023 show it losing 2.2%, so this may be the peak. There are a couple more quirks, starting with its size. It covers 3,254 square miles of land just in the incorporated city. This makes it the second largest city in the US by total area, only beating out Sitka, yet another Alaskan city. This means Juneau is larger than the state of Rhode Island. Now you could point out that this is just how Alaskan cities work and it's not interesting, but outside the top 4 largest cities, Alaska has nothing in the top 100. So there's only so much that you can push that idea, and it does cause some interesting logistical issues of upkeeping such a large swath of land. Now talking about the main oddity that we see with Juneau, being that it is not connected to the outside world by road. This is the main one that jumps out at you because the state capital not being connected to the rest of the state is unheard of in the rest of the country, for obvious reasons. In a time of defense, transportation can be difficult. Getting people from the state legislature to and from Juneau is more difficult than it has to be, and the entire part of the economy is taken away with truck travel. This lack of a road connection proves to be difficult for Juneau, but it's easy to explain. As a small child when I learned Juneau had no road connections to the outside world, I decided this road had to be built as soon as possible, but as an adult you can understand the situation. There are two real options, one of which would be connecting up to Haines in the north, and the second would be connecting into Canada in the east. To the north you'd be building into a mountainside, but more importantly through two marine state parks and a state park. The type of environmental impact that would come from this would make it extremely difficult to get it approved with the process of NEPA and the environmental impact statements in a fragile environment like this, plus a big bridge would need to be built somewhere, which isn't a viable option. So what about the other direction? The environmental impact may be difficult again, but at least there's no preserved federal land. Well, first off you'd have to connect to Canada, and who wants to go through the process of that? Second of all, there's a big glacier here, so really you would have to build a bridge to get around that, which yet again takes away the option of that basically ever happening. So the moral of that story is that children should never get their hopes up. One main thing about this city that makes it strange is the state capitol building, which is the most unimpressive thing you've ever seen. This is what it looks like, basically just being a big office building with four pillars at the front. It's not even remotely similar to any other state capitol, and I understand it's a unique situation in Juneau, but it would make the city so much cooler if this state capitol was awesome. I mean, the city is beautiful, look around at the water and the mountains. They deserved a nice capitol building. Apparently it was designed by treasury architects, which gave it more of a bank look. So I'd say in the future, maybe a different group of architects should be chosen. Anyway, now that we've explained how strange this city is, let's talk about why it exists, which obviously involves this state's fascinating history. So the settlement was established as a fishing place for native tribes, and Europeans found the settlement right around the end of the 18th century in 1764. In 1794. But things really started to kick off in the mid-1800s when gold was found in the region. Two men named Richard Harris and Joe Juneau found gold as large as beans in the area, so a mining camp was set up. Just a quick tidbit about that, Joe Juneau was the cousin of Solomon Juneau, which was one of the main founders of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. So I guess establishing important cities runs in their family. I would argue this is significantly cooler than the Ball family. Anyway, in 1880, over a hundred people resided in the mining community, and they decided to name it Juneau, which obviously stuck until present day. So at this point, basically all of the development in the Alaskan territory was in this archipelago. And so as the turn of the century passed, one major change happened. This involved the neighboring city of Sitka. Remember Sitka from before when I talked about America's largest cities? Well, at this point, it was the capital and most important settlement in the archipelago. But as whaling and the fur trade declined and it lost its importance, the territorial legislature moved to Juneau. At this time, Juneau was the most populous city in the territory, and it stayed this way for around 50 years, until Anchorage passed it in the 1950s. This capital status became more official when the U.S. Congress allocated funds for their capital building. Now, obviously these funds were not enough, but the construction began in 1929. It was finished and stayed as the capital building through 1959 when Alaska officially became a state. At this time, the population jumped even higher when more government officials moved to the city. And I think this draws interesting attention to the fact that Alaska as a state is just very new. This is around when somewhere like Detroit had already reached its peak and started to decline in population. So honestly, let's give these areas in Alaska more time to see what their real demographics may look like in 50 years. Either way, the short answer to our question of why it's the capital is that it was already the territorial capital, so since it was around the same population as Anchorage when Alaska became a state, they gave Juneau the government, and that's just not a very easy thing to change after it's already done. But that leads us to one final question. Why not just change the capital? The discussion has been had for probably 40 years now, as basically everyone has realized the lack of importance Juneau has to the entire state present day. Other states had more central capitals or more important capitals, so people pushed for it to be moved to either Anchorage or Fairbanks, the two largest cities in the state. The main problem with this is that you wouldn't want to put it in either of the most important cities and suddenly give them too much influence in state politics. Making Anchorage the capital would centralize the state in that metropolitan area too heavily, and Anchorage wouldn't want to see Fairbanks gain capital powers, so it would need to be a third location. There was a popular initiative to relocate the capital to a new location in western Alaska that was over 30 miles away from both Anchorage and Fairbanks. And there was another plan that was passed for the capital to be moved to Willow, a city between Anchorage and Fairbanks. But this never ended up happening for one main reason. What would happen to Juneau if it lost capital status? It would become significantly less important, and the people and government in Juneau do not want to see this happen. Residents would do absolutely anything necessary to keep the capital in their city. So in the 1970s when the Willow plan was passed, pro-Juneau supporters used some political loopholes to make sure it couldn't be moved. There are still pushes for it to be moved, but I think the political complications that would ensue if something like this was brought to a vote again would simply be enough to stop it. So I guess Juneau is set for at least a good 30 to 50 years. But that's the entire story. Juneau has a fascinating history, and is one of my favorite capital cities in the country, with the historical importance that led to its current situation. Let's just take a moment to appreciate the mountains, I mean those are so pretty. It's really difficult to argue with that. Thanks for watching. Thank you to the members this week, Charles Watson, Pete Tedeschi, HelloGaming123, Aiden Kiles, Janine Ellis, 2thickz, Simon M. 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