
Flagstaff: The Skylight City Was On the Beaten Path
This northern Arizona city in the pines exists because it is on a convenient transportation corridor spanning the continent. Between 1857 and 1859, Army troops under the command of Lieutenant Edward F. Beale built a wagon road across the Colorado Plateau following the “middle route” between Santa Fe and Los Angeles. Staying close to springs and abundant grass for animals, Beale’s road was shorter than the Old Spanish Trail through Utah and safer than the Gila Trail through the blistering desert frequented by Apache raiders. Travelers on the road would have sight of the landmark San Francisco Peaks for more than 75 miles in either direction and could water at Leroux Springs at the southwest base of the mountain.
Even before completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 plans called for two more, one to follow the Gila Trail and another taking the 35th Parallel middle route with Beale’s road. Knowing the Atlantic & Pacific railroad would build close to Leroux Springs a few sheep ranchers and two immigrant parties from Boston arrived at the base of the peaks in 1876. The second Boston party arrived in Antelope Valley on July 4th and made a pine tree into a flagpole to celebrate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. Finding the clearings between the copious Leroux Springs and the meager Antelope Spring 12 miles south a disappointing location for farming the Boston parties moved on, but their patriotic flagpole was the talk of the territory. When a government surveyor arrived two years later he found one of the sheep men living at the “Flagstaff” ranch not far from Antelope Spring.
As soon as it became clear that rails would pass by Antelope Spring, very early in 1881 a Prescott merchant and his nephew established a store on the side of the hill where water trickled out of the ground. That April Atlantic and Pacific Railroad surveyors staked out curves along the hillside and a group of Mormon entrepreneurs settled close to Leroux Springs to grade roadbed and cut ties all along the line. By the time rails were laid to Canyon Diablo west of Winslow the following year, a Chicago businessman was already hauling a complete steam powered sawmill by wagon train to Antelope Spring with a contract to supply the A & P. A primitive line of tents, log cabins and board buildings soon graced the hillside with a post office named Flagstaff in the general store.

After struggling to bridge the devil’s canyon, the railroad arrived at Flagstaff August 1, 1882 and 18 days later the sawmill boiler was fired and its steam whistle echoed through Antelope Valley. But the silence had already been broken by more than a dozen saloons serving railroad workers 24/7. Like every other town on the railroad front, Flagstaff was a dangerous cauldron of male exuberance supported by hefty railroad paychecks. “Cattle rustling was rampant and only conquered by stringing the culprits to a limb of a tree and riddling the bodies with bullets. Many were the shootings in the town. . . . They write about Tombstone and other early settlements, but Flagstaff was as bad as any of them” (p.37, Charles C. Stemmer, A Brand From the Burning, 1959).
The railroad put a water tank for their thirsty steam locomotives and a couple box cars for a depot in a relatively flat part of the valley about a mile east of the town on the hill. The general store and the larger saloons moved to a site opposite the depot in 1883 and built substantial buildings. This was “New Town” and Antelope Spring became “Old Town Spring.” Most of the money flowed into the orderly stores and rowdy saloons, giving their owners almost total control over the community.

If anyone tried to make Flagstaff a nice town, they were plagued by too much fire and too little water. Old Town burned down in 1884, then New Town burned in 1886 and 1888. The sawmill, despite a supply of water pumped from a spring, burned in 1887. Then the business district burned again in 1889, taking the railroad depot too. The town had to ban wooden structures downtown, opting instead for sandstone cut at a quarry about three miles east. Soon after it opened in 1887, the quarry was shipping rail cars of stone all over the west.

Water supply has always been a problem for Flagstaff. Beginning in 1883, the railroad and sawmill pumped water from O’Neil Springs over eight miles to the south. What Old Town Spring couldn’t provide was hauled in barrels from Leroux Springs and sold on the street at exorbitant rates until 1896. It took a lot of money and much work to finally lay a pipeline in 1898-99 from springs high on the Peaks. Surface water had to be added from upper Lake Mary reservoir in 1941, followed by an ever increasing number of deep wells beginning in 1954.



Flagstaff’s livelihood expanded over the years to include more than stone, cattle, sheep and lumber. By the 1890s the small town was publicizing its sunshine, pure air and mountain spring water. It became a lodging and outfitting point for tourists going to the Grand Canyon. The local cycling club blazed a trail and stages were making the trip three times a week by 1892. Silent film production crews came in the 1910s with Zane Grey scripts. When tourists started driving automobiles in addition to taking the train, Flagstaff’s middle route became a major cross-country highway, the National Old Trails Road beginning in the 1910s which became Route 66 in 1926. Arizona Snow Bowl ski runs opened in 1939, and expanded after the war. By 1957, the Black Canyon Highway connected Phoenix with Flagstaff, bringing more visitors for winter snows or cool summers.


An early promotional nickname was “The Skylight City,” referring to the 7,000-foot elevation. In 1894 Percival Lowell, attracted to the thin air at that altitude, picked a site on the hill above Old Town Spring to point a telescope through the skylight at the planet Mars. His observatory became an important scientific institution, and the site of the discovery of Pluto in 1930. Other scientists came to Flagstaff too. Fort Valley Experimental Forest was established near Leroux Springs in 1908 and is still teaching rangers how to care for trees. The Museum of Northern Arizona was created in 1928 to study the landscape and cultures of the Colorado Plateau. US Geological Survey established an astrogeology laboratory in Flagstaff in 1963 to train astronauts how to walk on the moon. There is a US Naval observatory to the west and a couple of university telescopes to the south.

Along with the rest of the state, Flagstaff experienced a growth spurt after World War II. Sawmill production increased in the 1950s and the railroad built a marshalling yard in 1957 on the east side to ship materials to the Glen Canyon Dam construction site at Page. The population of the “City in the Pines” increased 138% in the decade of the fifties, helped by the annexation of 48 square miles in 1957-59. It had become a college town with increasing enrollment at what had been the normal school. In 1966, the college became Northern Arizona University. Through the sixties and seventies, Flagstaff struggled to attract higher paying jobs as the timber industry collapsed. Nor could it accommodate the increased automobile traffic that came with growth. In the eighties it had a makeover, closing the old cowboy saloons and creating upscale neighborhoods and trendy art galleries, boutiques and bistros downtown. But racial tensions and income inequities persist.



Some sources:
Platt Cline, Mountain Campus (1983)
Platt Cline, They Came To The Mountain (1976)
Marie D. Jackson, Stone Landmarks. . . (1999)
Richard & Sherry Mangum, Flagstaff Past & Present (2003)
Russell Wahmann, The Historical Geography of the Santa Fe Railroad In Northern Arizona (1971)
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