History
Two different theories postulate that the spit originates either from the tidal swells and currents of Cook Inlet and Kachemak Bay over a millennia of sand buildup, or that it was pushed into place by now-retreated glaciers. In 1899, the Cook Inlet Coal Fields Company laid a railroad track along the spit, connecting the docks to the coal fields along Kachemak Bay. The resulting business led to the development of what eventually became Homer, Alaska. In the 1960s, several hippies, known as "spit rats", traveled from all around to camp on the Homer Spit, many of them becoming successful commercial fishermen over time. The 1964 Alaska earthquake shrank it to 508 acres (2.06 km2), and killed most of the vegetation, making it today mostly gravel and sand.
Read more about this topic: Homer Spit
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)