Page, Arizona

Page, Arizona did not exist until nineteen fifty-seven. The Bureau of Reclamation needed housing for the thousands of workers who would build Glen Canyon Dam, and there was nothing on the plateau above the canyon. The agency purchased seventeen square miles of land from the Navajo Nation in exchange for land in Utah, carved roads into the mesa top, and erected a large camp of trailers for the workers.

On Thanksgiving Day of nineteen fifty-seven, the first workers moved in. The town was named for John C. Page, a Bureau of Reclamation commissioner in the nineteen thirties who championed large-scale water projects across the West.

After the dam was finished in nineteen sixty-six, Page could have emptied out. Instead it became a tourism hub, perched at forty-three hundred feet above Lake Powell with access to Antelope Canyon, Horseshoe Bend, and the reservoir itself, making it a major gateway to the Colorado Plateau.