The trio served together in Congress for more than two decades, and while the Anchorage port is named for the late Rep. Don Young and the Anchorage airport is named for the late Sen. Ted Stevens, their congressional colleague, Sen. Frank Murkowski, is more at home in Southeast.

The Wrangell borough assembly last week voted unanimously to name the former 6-Mile mill property, which the borough is developing as an industrial site, as the Frank H. Murkowski Deepwater Port of Wrangell, Alaska.

Murkowski got his Alaska start in Southeast in Ketchikan and Wrangell 70 years ago before moving into politics and public service in Juneau and Washington, D.C.

In introducing the naming resolution at the Oct. 27 assembly meeting, Borough Manager Mason Villarma spoke to Murkowski’s long-term contributions to the state and the community, adding, “he has been an advocate of the site for a long, long time.”

The assembly last month adopted an ordinance, setting out requirements for naming public property after an individual. The port is the first use of that new ordinance.

“That’s very thoughtful of them,” Murkowski said in an interview the day after the assembly vote, though he noted, “That Polish name doesn’t sound very Southeast.”

Talking about the borough’s big plans for the property, he said: “Hopefully, all the things we hear are going to happen out there happen.”

The municipality purchased the 42 acres more than four years ago for $2.5 million, looking to develop and lease out the acreage for industrial tenants. The aim is to replace some of the jobs and economic activity lost in town when the mill and logging industry started shutting down in the 1990s.

Alaska Marine Lines is working to move its barge landing and freight operations to the property; Tideline Construction runs its scrap metal recycling and Southeast Alaska construction business from the site; and the borough is working with JAG Marine Group, the Ketchikan shipyard operator, to look for state and federal funding to build a multi-hundred-million-dollar large-scale shipyard to work on government vessels.

Villarma noted that the U.S. Economic Development Administration has awarded Wrangell about $30 million toward site work — utilities and roads — to prepare the former mill property for use as a deepwater industrial port.

“This couldn’t come at a most opportune time for us,” he told the assembly. “And I think it’s going to help attract investment to the site and create some additional buzz.”

Murkowski is 93 years old. He and his wife, Nancy, spend their summers in Wrangell. He came to Southeast with the U.S. Coast Guard in the mid-1950s and then went into banking and managed the National Bank of Alaska Wrangell branch 1963-1966 and served on the school board.

He was named commissioner of the Alaska Department of Commerce and Economic Development in 1966, then returned to banking until his election to the U.S. Senate in 1980.

He left the Senate in 2002, winning election as governor and serving one term.

And although he questioned whether his Polish name fits in Southeast, the Murkowski Port is not alone. There is an island in Southeast, Kosciusko Island, just north of Prince of Wales Island, named in 1879 after Polish citizen Tadeusz Kościuszko, who fought in the American Revolutionary War as a volunteer engineer, according to the Dictionary of Alaska Place Names published by the U.S. Department of the Interior.