The Railroad Transforms the Desert

In eighteen eighty-two, the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad laid track through the mountain meadow that would become downtown Flagstaff. The timing was decisive. Before the rails, northern Arizona was largely open range, visited by Navajo shepherds and the occasional army survey crew. After the rails, Flagstaff grew so quickly that by eighteen eighty-six it was the largest city on the entire line between Albuquerque and the Pacific coast.

The railroad did not just bring settlers. It brought the timber industry its first real market. The Riordan brothers recognized the opportunity and established the Arizona Lumber and Timber Company in the eighteen nineties, cutting ponderosa at scale and shipping it east and west along the same tracks. They even introduced electricity to Flagstaff to power the mill. For a generation, the locomotive whistle and the sawmill scream were the two sounds that defined the town.

Then came the automobile. Route Sixty Six was completed in nineteen twenty-six, running directly through downtown Flagstaff along what was then called Front Street. The road was so significant that Front Street was renamed Santa Fe Avenue in celebration. The Hotel Monte Vista opened on New Year's Day of nineteen twenty-seven to receive the new wave of motorists. By nineteen twenty-eight, Flagstaff had incorporated as a city with more than three thousand residents.

The Santa Fe Railroad responded by opening a new depot in Flagstaff in nineteen twenty-six to compete. For a few years the two transport eras overlapped, the rumble of freight trains and the rattle of Ford Model As sharing the same high-altitude air. The town that a stripped pine tree named had become a crossroads for a continent in motion.