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Spenard Lake, Alaska - 50 miles south west of Anchorage- (Photo courtesy of Anthony Spenard of Maryland.) The present flousishing community of Spenard area and Lake Spenard itself were not available for exploitation by private ownership until the activities of the early-day Anchorage drayman named, Joseph A. "Joe" Spenard who discovered the area and promptly "liberated" it from the tentacles of creeping bureaucracy. The feisty, muscular little fellow blazed his way into municipal maps for all time by hacking away a trail from Anchorage through the wilderness that carpeted the lower reaches of Chester and Campbell Creeks. On impulse, he took an offshoot-trail that brought him to a breathtakingly beautiful lake which he characteristically claimed as his own. (Up until Spenard took possession, the lake had been known as "Jeter Lake" in 1906 after Thomas Jeter who located coal claims in the Matanuska Valley and later homesteaded the mouth of Ship Creek.) Tom Jeter left Alaska for Washington State, and his name is now all but forgotten around the shores of Cook Inlet. Joe Spenard likewise pulled out of the country after a few years, but not before he had stirred around sufficiently to leave his name of the landscape with what promised to be a high degree of permanence. Born in the province of Ottawa in Canada in 1879, Joe Spenard came to Alaska about 1910 where he first landed in Valdez where he was listed as vice-president of the Alaska Securities Company, a firm which appears to have lacked durability. He then opened a secondhand business and bought, sold and swapped ming machinery, tools, household furnishings and anything else that happened to come on the market. When business was slack, it is reported, Joe loaded a hand cart and pushed it around the streets of Valdez, showing his wares. This pushcart eventually blossomed into a full-scale transfer business, which Spenard began to advertise in the spring of 1913 as the City Expr
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