a resting place close to home

And for Interior veterans, this is something they waited twenty years for.

Alaska just started building its first state cemetery set aside for veterans, on a site just south of Fairbanks. A 16.7 million dollar federal grant is paying for it, and crews broke ground last week.

Here's the part that stings a little. Alaska has more veterans per person than any state in the country, yet the Interior never had a place like this. The closest spots were hundreds of miles away, near Anchorage or down in Southeast. For a state with so many who served, that never made much sense.

So if you served, and you wanted to be laid to rest with full military honors close to home, the Interior simply didn't have room for you. That finally changes.

The dream started back in the 1970s, when a Fairbanks veteran walked into the state veterans office with an idea. The law passed in 2007, and it still took almost twenty more years to get shovels in the ground. After all this time, they're finally getting the honor they earned.

The first phase holds hundreds of resting places, and when it's done it'll serve more than twelve thousand veterans and their families across the Interior. Construction should wrap up by the fall of 2027.

And you don't have to wait for opening day to claim your spot. Veterans can register now, and I put the details below.