O'er Land and Sea a Beacon Bright

This long green ribbon of grass through downtown Anchorage is the Delaney Park Strip, and it has a flying past. When Anchorage was a raw railroad camp in nineteen twenty-three, the whole town turned out under a leader named Arthur Shonbeck to clear this stretch of land of trees and stumps. The cleared ground became three things at once.

It was a firebreak to protect the wooden town, a nine-hole golf course, and Anchorage's very first airstrip, where bush pilots set down their planes at the edge of the wilderness. The strip is named for James Delaney, one of the city's early mayors. Today it is a park lined with memorials, and the marker here, taking its name from the Alaska flag song, remembers the pilots who once used this very grass to land and take off into the great Alaska skies.