Logging, Route 66 and an ‘astronomical’ claim to fame – St George News

An old logger wagon in Flagstaff, Arizona, date unknown | Photo by Reuben Wadsworth, St. George News

FEATURE – Ponderosa pines for miles. Wide expanses of lava fields. A treasure trove of Native American ruins. Sitting at the base of the San Francisco Peaks, Flagstaff is not the desert landscape of Saguaro and Cholla cactus that its state is known for. 

At 7,000 feet, it’s milder than much of the rest of the state as well. 

“What started out as a pass through on the way to California became a community of hardy individuals that with the help of the railroad became a spot for medical, food supplies, and entertainment in the late 1880s,” said Dr. Kristen Rex Vice President of Education programs for the Arizona Historical Society.  

Flagstaff also holds an iconic place in the history of astronomy.

“Pluto was discovered in Flagstaff at Lowell Observatory, all the astronauts that walked on the moon trained in Flagstaff, including Lowell Observatory, and Flagstaff is the world’s first international dark sky city,” said Meg Roederer, Communications Specialist with Discover Flagstaff.

The home of Northern Arizona University was also on the front lines of a grand era of American nostalgia, the glory days of Route 66. 

Flagstaff celebrates this history and it is all on display for everyone to see, from the casual visitor to the die-hard history buff.

Early history

Soon after Arizona became a territory acquired from Mexico, in 1848, the United States began exploring its new territory to make maps, find resources and establish the best travel routes. One such trailblazer became Lt. Edward Beale, who between 1857 and 1860, was tasked with heading up a crew that would eventually build a road across Northern Arizona. Beale dispatched favorable reports to Congress about the area near the base of the San Francisco Peaks, describing its water supply, its potential for timber and its abundant grasslands for grazing, the Discover Flagstaff website related.

Emigrants traveling to California began utilizing the road. On July 4, 1876, a party from Boston, who originally planned to settle on the Little Colorado near Winslow but decided to forge on to California, camped by a spring on their way through. 

“In honor of the nation’s centennial, they stripped a pine tree of its branches and bark and raised an American flag,” Discover Flagstaff explains.”When they moved on, their “flag staff” became a landmark for those who followed.”

That same year, a small group of sheep ranchers migrated to the area and set up ranches where they found adequate water and grass. Even though the area was isolated at the time, they did not see it as a problem because, unlike food and produce, wool would not spoil and would easily survive the trip back east to market.

In 1880, the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad started to lay track west of Albuquerque to eventually reach California. As the track neared, a small settlement started to take shape on Observatory Mesa, aka Mars Hill, west of today’s downtown. Merchants and saloon keepers began setting up shop in anticipation of the railroad graders and tie cutters. They decided to call their town Flagstaff in honor of the previously-described landmark. When the track reached Flagstaff on August 1, 1882, Flagstaff was a full-fledged railroad town, Discover Flagstaff explains.

Some chose to move along with the railroad, but others stayed.

“Fortunately for those who stayed, Flagstaff became an established stop for water servicing the railroad and its passengers,” Discover Flagstaff says. “Sheep ranchers began to use the railroad to transport wool and cattle ranchers, drawn by the prospect of free or inexpensive land, realized that they could now affordably ship their beef to the eastern market.”

Lumber mills became another profitable business, with a businessman by the name of E.E. Ayers setting up a large mill before the railroad even reached the fledgling town.

The city’s landscape started to change in 1883 when the railroad decided to move its depot approximately half a mile east of town so that trains would not have to start up the steep hillside. Some merchants moved to be close to the depot, but others decided to stay, essentially resulting in two towns for a while, “New Town” and “Old Town.” New Town’s proximity to the driving force of  commerce and a devastating fire in Old Town in 1884 resulted in New Town becoming the one and only town.

In the early 1890s, Flagstaff reached a population of approximately 1,500, becoming one of the largest towns in the Arizona Territory (it didn’t achieve statehood until 1912). Realizing that the town would soon be too big to continue without formal organization, its residents voted to incorporate in 1894, starting its history as a major transportation and business hub and the largest city in Northern Arizona.

The Riordans and their mansion

Brothers Timothy and Michael Riordan moved to Flagstaff in the 1880s as managers and later owners of the town’s largest employer at the time: the Arizona Lumber and Timber Company. They played a crucial role in the creation of Coconino County, the establishment of what would become Northern Arizona University, and the success of two local scientific institutions, Lowell Observatory and the Fort Valley Experimental Forest Station.

Visitors can learn about their legacy through a visit to the mansion they left behind. The Riordan Mansion is essentially two separate homes connected by a common area known as the billiard room and is one of the best examples of Arts and Crafts Architecture, fashioned from locally-sourced materials that blend into its environment similar to later Parkitecture, a technique used in nearby national park lodges built later.

The homes, seen by guided tour only, look essentially as they did in 1904 and display original family belongings and examples of early Stickley furniture. 

An Astronomer’s Dream

Percival Lowell was born into a well-to-do Boston family and studied mathematics at Harvard. His brother, Abbott, served as president of Harvard and his sister, Amy, was a Pulitzer Prize winning poet.

“Lowell had become interested in studying what he thought were canals—built by some sort of intelligent life—on Mars,” a plaque at the Lowell Observatory explains. “In 1894 he established Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona to pursue this study.”

One of the observatory’s most famous “residents” is the Clark refractor telescope, which Lowell commissioned Alvan Clark and Sons to build in 1895. To build the telescope’s dome, Lowell contracted local Flagstaff bike shop owner Godfrey Sykes, as he and his brother Stanley proclaimed to be “menders and makers of anything,” the Lowell Observatory website explains.

While the dome has experienced many renovations and updates over the years, it still looks much like it did in Lowell’s time. When first constructed, the dome rotated on a set of metal wheels rolled around a track, and for a time in the early 20th century, the staff experimented rotating the dome with a system of pontoons floating on saltwater, which proved messy. In 1960, the observatory replaced metal wheels with car tires, the method that is still used today.

The Clark telescope dome is the first thing visitors see as they wind up the road to Mars Hill, fittingly the name for the hill on which the observatory sits. The telescope is one of the most famous telescopes in the world, Lowel Observatory Historian and Public Information Officer Kevin Schindler said.

“Percival Lowell himself used the Clark to study the surface of Mars, searching for signs of intelligent life,” the observatory website explains. “His theories on the subject fostered massive public interest in astronomy and sparked the imaginations of science fiction writers for generations to come.”

The Clark Telescope’s other claims to fame include helping map the moon in the 1960s as part of the Apollo…