Kingman: Named for the Man Who Mapped the Route
Near Chloride, Arizona
In eighteen eighty-two the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad drove tracks across northwestern Arizona through a dry valley between the Cerbat and Hualapai Mountains. The new siding was named for Lewis Kingman, the railroad surveyor who had mapped the route through this stretch of Mohave County desert. Within five years Kingman was chosen as the county seat, sitting astride the rail corridor that connected Albuquerque to the California coast.
Gold and silver discoveries in the nearby hills brought miners, and Kingman became their supply town. Beale's Wagon Road, a pre-Civil War military road that Edward Beale had surveyed through here in eighteen fifty-seven with the Army's experimental camel corps, was eventually paved over and in nineteen twenty-six became part of Route Sixty-Six. Andy Devine, the gravel-voiced character actor who appeared in more than four hundred films, was born in Flagstaff in nineteen oh five and raised here.
The city's main street still bears his name.
