The Riordan Brothers' Flagstaff Lumber Empire

Timothy and Michael Riordan arrived in Flagstaff in the eighteen eighties and went into the lumber business. The San Francisco Peaks above the city were forested with ponderosa pine on a scale that made any other industry in the area look modest. The brothers built the Arizona Lumber and Timber Company into one of the dominant timber operations in the Southwest, employing hundreds of workers and shipping finished lumber across the region to supply the construction booms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In nineteen oh four, at the height of their prosperity, the brothers built themselves a house. The structure they built was unusual even by the standards of Gilded Age excess. It was actually two separate houses connected by a single large common room they called the Rendezvous, one house for Timothy's family and one for Michael's, joined at the center so the brothers could share a living room without quite sharing a home. The total structure ran to forty rooms and approximately thirteen thousand square feet, built in the Arts and Crafts style with log-slab exterior siding and a stone foundation. The building material came, naturally, from their own forest.

The Riordan mansion still stands in Flagstaff as a state historic park. The brothers' personal effects, original furnishings, and family documents are preserved inside. The timber fortune that built it left a different kind of legacy in the surrounding landscape. The ponderosa pine forests around Flagstaff were substantially clearcut by the middle of the twentieth century. Restoration of those forests is an ongoing conservation project.

The mansion is the most visible monument to what the brothers built. The thinned forest around the city is the monument to how they built it.