Seventy years ago, fifty-five Alaskans gathered in Fairbanks to do something no generation before them had ever done: write a constitution for a state that did not yet exist. On October 15, 2026, the Cook Inlet Historical Society opens its 2026-2027 speaker series at the Anchorage Museum with a free public talk marking that anniversary, tracing how a territory became a state and how the document its delegates produced became one of the most admired constitutions in the nation.
The speaker is Matt Peterson, an Anchorage attorney. Peterson is retired from trial work but continues as a mediator and arbitrator, a Retired Emeritus Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, and a member of the National Association of Distinguished Neutrals. He also serves on the board of the Professional Mediators of Alaska and belongs to the United States Supreme Court Historical Society. His connection to the subject runs deeper than scholarship: while serving on the Alaska Bar Association's Committee on Fair and Impartial Courts, Peterson conducted oral history interviews with delegates to the 1955 Alaska Constitutional Convention, sitting down with the people who had actually written the document. His article on the Alaska Constitution was recently published by the Brennan Center's State Court Report.
The story he will tell begins long before the convention. Through the 1940s, the movement for Alaska statehood was gaining momentum within the territory but was stymied by opposition from Lower 48 commercial interests and some members of Congress. Many statehood proponents came to believe that a well-written constitution would help advance the cause in Washington, D.C. The Alaska Territorial Legislature, which had established the Alaska Statehood Committee in 1949, charged that body with assembling applicable material, making studies, and providing recommendations in preparation for drafting a constitution.
The convention itself convened on November 8, 1955, in the brand-new student union building on the University of Alaska campus at College, a few miles west of Fairbanks — a building now known as Constitution Hall. The delegates had been elected just two weeks earlier, on October 25, in a nonpartisan election. Seven came from each of the territory's four judicial divisions, with 27 elected at large, and they arrived from every corner of Alaska. They were miners, lawyers, teachers, fishermen, homesteaders, and veterans. Among them were six women and two Alaska Native leaders, Frank Peratrovich of Klawock and James K. Huntington of Huslia. William A. Egan, who would become Alaska's first governor, was chosen president of the convention. Other notable delegates included Ralph Rivers, Dorothy Awes Haaland, John B. Coghill, Victor Rivers, and Steve McCutcheon.
The number 55 was not accidental. It was chosen in emulation of the 55-member Philadelphia convention of 1787, a deliberate nod to the founders whose work the delegates were self-consciously echoing. The territorial legislature had authorized the convention earlier that year and funded it with $300,000 — a bold investment in Alaska's future at a time when statehood was far from guaranteed.
Over the next 75 days, through a dark and frigid Fairbanks winter, the delegates worked with remarkable industry. They examined the constitutions of all 48 existing states and leaned heavily on the 1954 Model State Constitution produced by the National Municipal League. Their goal was clarity, brevity, and flexibility — a framework that would serve a vast and diverse land. They finished faster than expected, producing a document of roughly 14,000 words in plain, modern English. The constitution was adopted by the convention on February 5, 1956, and signed the following day in what is now Signers' Hall. Territorial voters ratified it on April 24, 1956, and it became operative with the formal proclamation of statehood on January 3, 1959, after Congress passed the Alaska Statehood Act.
Peterson's presentation will review the development of civil government during Alaska's territorial period and the statehood movement, the work of the 1955-56 convention, the rights of citizens, the structure of the government the delegates designed, the innovations in the constitution, and the amendments adopted since. The document has been amended 28 times.
The setting for the talk carries its own historical weight. The Cook Inlet Historical Society is the private, non-profit historical society for the Anchorage area. Since its founding it has fostered discussion, research, and publication of the history and ethnography of the Anchorage and Cook Inlet regions, as well as Alaska's place in the Circumpolar North. The society was the principal organization responsible for establishing the Anchorage Museum in 1968, the very building where Peterson will speak.
The event is the first in the society's 2026-2027 speaker series. It is free and open to the public, with both in-person and virtual attendance options, and the same link can be used to review a recording after the program concludes. For anyone who has ever wondered how a territory with no road to the outside world, no established tax base, and no guarantee that Congress would ever grant statehood managed to write a governing document that scholars still cite as a model, the answer is a room full of Alaskans in Fairbanks in the winter of 1955 — and a retired lawyer who spent years asking the people in that room what it was like.