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Tuba Trading Post
This is Tuba City’s famous trading post, built in the late 1880s in the then Mormon settlement of Tuba City. (Tuba was an English approximation of the name of the Hopi chief TIvi).
Phoenix’s Plaza Bandstand
This is a 1901 photograph of the bandstand sat City Hall Plaza, located on the block between Washington and Jefferson streets and Montezuma (First Street) and Maricopa (Second Street). The men in the photo are not identified, but written on the back of the photo is the name of J.C. Dodds. The 1903 City Directory lists Dodds as a driver for Ezra W. Thayer. That is Thayer’s hardware store across t[...]
Three-Fingered Jack
This is Jack Laustenneau, presumably photographed in 1903 when he became the 2,029th prisoner to pass through the sally port of the Territorial Prison at Yuma.
The Governor’s Race (for the train)
The bald pate and rotund body seen here on the Capitol veranda is that of George W. P. Hunt, photographed on Valentine’s Day, 1912, delivering his inaugural address as the state’s first governor.
Hoover Dam Construction
This photograph of Hoover Dam was probably taken about 1935 when construction of the dam was almost complete. It took five years – from 1931 to 1936 – to build what was then the largest concrete dam in the world. It was built in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, in northwestern Arizona on the border with Nevada.
Shootout at Marble Canyon
Buck Lowery, owner of the pictured filling station at Marble Canyon, befriended Carl and Albert White in 1930. Lowery fed the runaway Utah brothers, aged 12 and 14 respectively, a free meal and arranged homebound transportation for them, thinking no more about the episode.
Monroe St., Downtown Phoenix
To many newcomers, it must seem as though the Phoenix Convention Center has been on Monroe Street forever, when actually it is an artifact of recent times, a modern monument to downtown Phoenix renewal.
The Sanitary Milk Crusade
“Local Milk Fails the Standards” announced the headline of the Bisbee Daily Review on June 18, 1914. The following day more alarming news greeted residents as they read “Conditions of Milk Bad in District.”
The McClarty House
This Queen Anne-style home, large, but not a mansion, was typical of the residential housing that once lined downtown Phoenix, but was razed in the 1960s and 1970s, when the central city seemed to be suited for nothing better than parking.
Multi-national Miners
Arizona’s mining camps were full of immigrants. The 1882 Great Register of Cochise County listed residents born in Algiers, Argentina, Australia, Azores, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Finland French Guinea, Greece, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovenia and Spain. There was even one resident born at sea.
Finding Mormon Lake
This is the post office and gas station at the little community of Mormon Lake, south of Flagstaff. Behind the building you can see what should be the lake. At the time of this photo in the 1940s, the lake apparently was dry – a condition that would come and go depending on weather. At various times, the lake bed was full of native grasses and was prime rangeland; at other times it was planted w[...]
A 1940s Nogales Shopping Trip
Nogales, Sonora, a traditional tourist attraction that draws streams of visitors from Arizona, is a city of some half a million, but was only about one sixth that size when these Phoenicians posed in front of one of its shops in 1948.
