Images courtesy born1945 on Flickr
In 1934, Paul Satko lost his job as a welder and machinist in Richmond, Virginia. Like many other Americans at the time, for months he searched for a job to support his wife, Mollie, and their several children, only to come home in vain. Unlike many other Americans at the time, he refused to accept relief or government handouts to the unemployed. Instead, he heard of a government program offering 40-acre plots in Matanuska Valley in the territory of Alaska and apparently decided that he, his wife and two of their oldest children could combine four lots to create a vast 160-acre farm. Getting there, however, would be another story altogether.
Satko, a Marine Corps veteran who had sailed to China, the Philippines and Hawaii, decided to build himself a boat. However, rather than sail it out of an East Coast port and then on to Alaska, Satko decided to haul it across the country and then launch it from a West Coast port. Basing it on a truck chassis with the rear wheels still attached, he welded the steel frame of the nine-foot-tall, 40-foot-long boat together in Richmond, gathering whatever scrap materials he could find. To tow the boat, he used another truck chassis, stripped to the framerails and re-powered by a 1926 Buick engine – at most a 75hp, 275-cu.in. overhead-valve six-cylinder. In early 1938, he, Mollie, and seven of their nine children then set out from Richmond to Tacoma, Washington, attracting attention the whole way and earning the boat a nickname, the “Ark of Juneau.”
By November of that year, they made it to Puget Sound and Satko resumed the construction of the boat, building the rest of the hull out of two-inch-thick fir planks, painted yellow. He filled the bottom of the Ark with cement to force it to draw more water and thus remain more stable in the water, and he powered it with the same Buick engine that he used to lug it across the country. By mid-April 1940, after investing about $2,000 and three years of his time, he finished the Ark and set sail northwards.
The initial voyage only lasted a few days, curtailed when Satko ran aground on a sandbar at Magnolia Bluff outside Seattle. After the Coast Guard towed the Ark into port, a fellow sailor, Captain John Fox, executive secretary of the Master, Mates and Pilots’ Union, filed a complaint with the county requesting that the children be removed from the boat for their own safety. “This thing has passed beyond the stage of a joke,” Captain Fox told the Associated Press. “(The Ark) hasn’t enough power for the Alaskan trip. this was demonstrated when it was unable to make headway in a fresh breeze and moved sidewise. She would be a menace to navigation. Pilots would have to be on the alert for her constantly.” A judge agreed, and police removed six of the seven children from the boat, arresting Satko in the process for trying to prevent the police from serving the court order.
He shortly after posted bail, thanks to the help of some friendly Tacoma residents, and set about altering the Ark as the judge requested while the rest of the family – ordered to remain off the Ark – stayed in an apartment in Seattle. Yet a month later, with the alterations incomplete, Satko set sail for Everett, Washington, where he met up with the rest of his family, driven up by supporters who wanted to see them on their way. After a brief stop in Anacortes, Washington, where the Coast Guard refused to allow the Ark to continue, the Satkos left under the cover of darkness to make it to Canadian waters before the Coast Guard could catch up to them. Two months later, they made it to Juneau and eventually homesteaded in the area, though they were never able to obtain the 40-acre plots that set them on their journey. After the war, most of the family returned to Richmond. Parts of the Ark remain beached near Juneau today, according to the Juneau Empire. Paul Satko died in 1957.
UPDATE (28.September 2011): One more photo of the Ark in the water, courtesy Michael Sean Sullivan, who added the tidbit that Satko cooled the Buick engine not with a radiator, but with a series of tubes that ran along the keel.
UPDATE (29.September): It looks like the Buick six-cylinder engine from the Ark has been found, still on a beach in Alaska.