Welcome to Galena, Alaska

Galena, Alaska, is a village of 675 people located along the Yukon River about 280 miles east of Fairbanks. The community is home to three schools: the Sidney C. Huntington School, which serves the community; the Galena Interior Learning Academy, a vocational boarding school serving 200 students from throughout the state; and the Interior Distance Education of Alaska (IDEA), a statewide homeschool program for 3,500 students.

The Yukon River near Galena has been the home for the Koyukon Athabascan people for thousands of years. The modern history of Galena begins in 1918, when miners seeking lead set up a supply depot near an Athabascan fish camp they called Henry's Point. Galena is a common mineral found with lead and silver ore.

In 1920, Athabascans living upriver at Louden starting moving to the supply depot to sell wood for steamboats and haul freight for the miners. A school was established in the mid-1920s. The community became an important staging area for the Lend Lease program in World War II supplying Russia with planes and arms. After the war, the Air Force expanded the airport and created a base in Galena. During the Cold War, the Galena Air Force Station became a forward operating base for the 5072nd Air Force Group, and planes regularly scrambled out of Galena to confront Soviet fighters testing the border with the United States. Even though the base was closed in 1993, it is still used by the military for training.

The Galena Interior Learning Academy now occupies the site of the base. Galena used to be located solely on the southern edge of the Air Force base, but  floods in the spring of 1971 led residents to create another residential area along Alexander Lake, about two miles from the base. Most of the community now lives in the "new town" area. The original part of Galena is sometimes called "old town" or "downtown."