Page as a Company Town

There was no city of Page before nineteen fifty-seven. There was only a sandstone mesa jutting over Glen Canyon, and below it, one of the most remote stretches of the Colorado River in the American West. In October of nineteen fifty-six, the Bureau of Reclamation broke ground on Glen Canyon Dam and immediately faced a practical problem: where would the workers live?

The nearest communities were hours away over unpaved roads. The solution was to build a city from scratch on the canyon rim. What the Bureau built was a textbook company town.

Trailers arrived first, then prefabricated houses for management personnel. The Bureau controlled the streets, the utilities, and the housing assignments. Workers at the dam lived under Bureau jurisdiction in a community designed entirely to serve the project.

At its peak in the early nineteen sixties, more than two thousand five hundred workers were employed at the dam site alone, and the overall population swelled to roughly seven thousand five hundred people. The town was originally called Government Camp. It was renamed for John C.

Page, who had served as Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation from nineteen thirty-six to nineteen forty-three. He died in nineteen fifty-five, two years before the camp bearing his name was even established. When Glen Canyon Dam was completed in nineteen sixty-six, the Bureau gradually transferred control of the community to its residents.

Page incorporated as an official town on March first, nineteen seventy-five. Today it is a city of roughly seven thousand people, sustained not by dam construction but by the tourism that Antelope Canyon, Horseshoe Bend, and Lake Powell bring to the mesa.