Arizona Capitol Times Your Inside Source for Arizona Government, Politics and Business

Lindbergh Visits Tucson

This is what the building on the northwest corner of Third Avenue and Washington Street looked like 70 years ago, when it was occupied by the Central Arizona Light & Power Company. Today it is home to Stickler’s Restaurant, which opened in early 2004, replacing Walker’s Café, which had been at the location since late 2001.

At first glance, this 1904 photograph looks like a contingent of cavalry guarding captives. It is not. These are the engineers and laborers, and their wives, involved in construction of Roosevelt Dam, one of the first reclamation dams in the U.S.

The logs were hauled from nearby forests by steam locomotive, off-loaded by crane (right foreground) and floated in the mill pond of the Flagstaff lumber mill until they were selected for cutting. The tiny figure on the far edge of the pond is a mill worker choosing logs for the conveyor to the second floor of the saw mill.

Hackberry, 27 miles northeast of Kingman, was a center of commerce and shipping for cattlemen and miners, and later was a rest stop for motorists on Route 66.

A silver boom in Mohave County created an instant town that by 1894 had a school, a literary society, a church, a hotel and a population of more than 1,000.

This is the main thoroughfare of Paradise, Arizona, photographed sometime after the turn of the century. Note the boy running toward the hotel at right, the burro grazing in the street, another tied under the tree and the collection of barrels spilling over with things unknown.

Despite its stark appearance, the U.S. Indian Agency at the San Carlos Apache Reservation was a marked improvement over the “…log hut with an earthen floor and canvas doors” that served as headquarters when John P. Clum, newly appointed agent, arrived on the reservation on Aug. 8, 1874.

The original St. Joseph’s Academy (called the Convent School) was established in 1868 adjacent to Tucson’s old St. Augustine Cathedral. It was a thick-walled adobe building, built in the “fashion of the country’’ with earthen floors and a roof of sagebrush and cactus interfaced on pine rafters and covered with mud.

Nogales City Hall was commissioned by the Nogales Volunteer Fire Department in 1914, opened in 1915, and served as Town Hall and later City Hall for 65 years.