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 program, being featured in many educational TV shows dating back to the 1950s and appearing in a poster on “Big Bang Theory” main character Sheldon and Leonard’s apartment door, Schindler said.

The telescope was also used in Lowell’s attempts to find a “theoretical 9th planet,” plaques at the observatory note. He started the search for what he called “Planet X” but hadn’t found it by the time he died in 1916.

Looking through a more-than-100-year-old telescope is a special experience for visitors.

“It’s not just looking through a telescope, “Schindler noted. “It’s a real feel.”

Schindler calls Percival Lowell the Carl Sagan of his time, explaining that Lowell gave many public talks and popularized the idea of intelligent life on other planets, inspiring Edgar Rice Burroughs “John Carter of Mars” series as well as H.G. Wells “The War of the Worlds,” Schindler said.

However, later astronomers have identified the canals Lowell thought he was seeing on Mars as illusions.

“He wasn’t a crackpot,” Schindler said of Lowell. “He was a mainstream guy with unusual ideas.”

After Lowell’s death, the search for “Planet X” was put on hold for over a decade. In 1927, Roger Lowell Putman, Lowell’s nephew became the observatory’s sole trustee and one of his top priorities was the search for the supposed ninth planet. Lowell’s younger brother, Abbott, donated $10,000 for the construction of a new telescope, a 13 inch photographic instrument known as an astrograph, a plaque at the observatory explains.

Observatory Director Vesto Slipher hired a young man from Kansas named Clyde Tombaugh to operate the astrograph. Arriving in Flagstaff in 1929, Tombaugh began a systematic search for “Planet X” using indications from Lowell’s research.

“The telescope was ideal for the search, and Clyde Tombaugh proved to have the patience and attention to detail necessary for the work,” the plaque notes.

Along with the astrograph, the other instrument used to discover Pluto was a “Blink Comparator,” which allows the operator to switch the view back and forth between two photographic plates showing the same area of the sky taken several days apart. The telescope took photographic plates six days apart – January 23 & 29, 1930 –  and looking at those plates three week later, on February 18, 1930, Tombaugh discovered Pluto by comparing the two plates. The observatory made the announcement on March 13, 1930, what would have been Lowell’s 75th birthday.

“Excitement about the discovery quickly spread across the world, and many people offered suggestions of what to call the new body,” the plaque says.

Venetia Burney, a young girl from England made the name nomination that eventually became adopted.

“Her uncle telegrammed her suggestion to an Oxford professor who relayed it to Lowell Observatory,” another plaque explains. “All planets except for Earth have historically been named after gods and goddesses, (Burney) argued. ‘Pluto,’ the god of the Underworld, was consistent with this tradition and an ideal name for a cold and distant planet.”

Schindler said the Pluto discovery telescope holds the distinction as the only telescope to discover a planet in the United States, but today is more a historic relic than a oft-utilized astronomical tool like its counterpart, the Clark Telescope. Unfortunately, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union downgraded Pluto to “dwarf planet” status. 

The debate about Pluto’s place in the solar system is part of what keeps people interested, Schindler noted. That controversy also translates into fun merchandise available at the museum, such as T-shirts and hats with a special insignia: a “P” on top and an “L” formed underneath the “P” from its stem to represent Pluto. Those two letters, of course, are also the observatory founder’s initials.

Today, the Lowell Observatory is a first-class educational institution with numerous programs to teach visitors about varying aspects of astronomy. Schindler said it truly has something for everyone. For more information, visit the its website.

A Stop on the “Mother Road”

Beale’s wagon road through Flagstaff would eventually become part of a famous thoroughfare from Chicago to Santa Monica, California. 

“In the early 20th century Route 66 or US Highway 66 was one of main arteries for settlers seeking new opportunities, tourists discovering America, and home to new and influential businesses across the country,” the Enjoy Flagstaff website explains. “In one way or another, we have all likely experienced the iconic nature of historic Route 66 in some way.”

The Federal Highway Act of 1921 led to the development of the major highway by turning portions of the “National Old Trails Highway” into U.S. Highway 66. It reached Flagstaff in 1926 and the main road through town, which was once Front Street then Railroad Avenue, became known as Santa Fe Avenue. The original route of the highway through town was realigned in the 1930s. 

Old businesses gave way to diners and motels to accommodate the throngs of tourists who started traveling the road. Flagstaff, just like other towns along the route, saw many such businesses spring up after the road’s completion, including the Sierra Vista Motel, the Motel Du Beau Travelers Inn, and the B&M Auto Camp. 

In his 1939 classic novel, “The Grapes of Wrath,” author John Steinbeck refers to Route 66 as the “Mother Road.”

“During the dust bowl, the mother road was a beacon of hope that promised a better future for many refugees in the fertile lands to the west,” Enjoy Flagstaff notes.

Another Federal Highway Act, of 1956, which began the construction of interstate freeways, signaled the demise of the route. The very last section of Interstate 40 was completed through Williams, Arizona in 1970. Route 66 continued to be a federal road after that, but traffic traveling it reduced significantly. In 1985, it was decommissioned as a federal highway. Numerous small towns along the old Route 66 began to die, but Flagstaff would continue to grow though the downtown, which lay along Route 66, suffered major blows.

Nostalgia for Route 66 led to the formation of the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona by a small group of people along the Arizona Route 66. In the 1990s, Flagstaff reinstated the road as “Historic Route 66.” In 1994, sections of old Route 66 would be designated an Arizona Scenic Byway and in 2009 it became an “All American Road.”

For those interested, Discover Flagstaff features a walking tour of Route 66 history

Visiting Flagstaff

There is much more to Flagstaff than the history recounted in this story. A great place to start a visit to Flagstaff is to check out the Discover Flagstaff Visitor Center, which is housed in the old railroad depot and still serves as a hub for Amtrak.

Within the city limits, visitors can check out the Fort Tuthill and Northern Arizona museums.

Within approximately an hour’s drive of Flagstaff, visitors will find several national monuments showcasing the remains left behind from ancient native civilizations, including Walnut Canyon, Wupatki, Montezuma’s Castle and Tuzigoot. Another national monument just outside of the city limits is Sunset Crater Volcano.

In addition to the Lowell Observatory, Meteor Crater, located 45 minutes east of Flagstaff on I-40, is a wonderful stop for those interested in astronomy. It also served as a training ground for Apollo astronauts. 

Flagstaff also serves as a gateway city to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, located approximately an hour and a half north. The historic Grand Canyon Railway hub is in Williams, just 35 minutes west on I-40.

For those more interested in recreation, Sedona, with its picturesque red rock vistas, is only 45 minutes away and is reached via scenic Oak Creek Canyon. The Arizona Snowbowl, a ski and summer resort, is only a half hour north of town.

For more information about Flagstaff, visit the Discover Flagstaff website.

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About the series “Days”

“Days” is a series of stories about people and places, industry and history in and surrounding the region of southwestern Utah.

“I write stories to help residents of southwestern Utah enjoy the region’s history as much as its scenery,” St. George News contributor Reuben Wadsworth said.

To keep up on Wadsworth’s adventures, “like” his author Facebook page or follow his Instagram account.

Wadsworth has also released a book compilation of many of the historical features written about Washington County as well as a second volume containing stories about other places in Southern Utah, Northern Arizona and Southern Nevada.