Flagstaff is a city in, and the county seat of, Coconino County in northern Arizona, in the southwestern United States. Established as a modern settlement in 1876 and incorporated as a city in 1928, the land had previously been lived on by native peoples of the southwest, primarily the Sinagua. Mountaineer Antoine Leroux then traveled the area, with Edward Fitzgerald Beale following in his footsteps and establishing a trail through the city in the mid-1800s. With a local spring, a small settlement grew by the wagon road, and the town was dominated by the McMillan, Riordan, and Babbitt families. Focused on agricultural pursuits, these families constructed some historic red stone buildings that still stand today.
Beale's trail was replaced with cross-country railroads and highways, including Route 66. This expanded tourism – a main draw of the city is its location surrounded by sites of natural wonder, including the Grand Canyon – and was cause for an economic boost even through the Great Depression, before overpopulation and poor infrastructure led to the city's decline. A heritage project revitalized the city in the 1990s, leading to it developing a downtown culture. Through its history, Flagstaff has also been an astronomy hot-spot, given its altitude of around and pollution-free skies.
Early settlements
The Sinagua people were a pre-Columbian culture that occupied a large area in Arizona from the Little Colorado River, near Flagstaff, to the Verde River near Sedona, including the Verde Valley, area around the San Francisco Peaks, and significant portions of the Mogollon Rim country, between approximately 500 CE and 1425 CE. The Northern Sinagua began living in the pine forests of northern Arizona in the 5th century before moving into the area that is now Flagstaff in about 700 CE.
Though a largely hunter-gatherer culture, Sinagua farmers cultivated maize beginning in the 8th century. They learned irrigation techniques from their southern Hohokam neighbors and added beans and squash to their crops. The 1064 and 1066 eruptions of Sunset Crater covered the area in ash, which greatly enriched the soil for farming.
Guy Gibbon mapped the cultural phases of the Northern Sinagua, placing them around Sunset Crater between 700 CE and 900 CE (leaving the Wupatki National Monument ruins); the Rio de Flag from 900 to 1066 (leaving the Picture Canyon site); Angell and Winona between 1066 and 1100; Padre Canyon from 1100 to 1150; Elden Pueblo between 1150 and 1250; Turkey Hill Pueblo from 1250 to 1300; and Clear Creek between 1300 and 1400. They are also believed to have worked the land around Walnut Canyon from around 600 CE until the mid-13th century, farming at the rim before moving into cliff dwellings in the canyon in the 12th century.
The Sunset Crater eruption and subsequent agricultural benefits also caused a population growth in the area, with Ancestral Puebloans and Cohonina people also moving to the Wupatki site.
Sinagua peoples left the area by the early 15th century. Like other pre-Columbian cultures in the southwest, the Sinagua apparently abandoned their permanent settlements around this time, though the precise reasons for such a large-scale abandonment are not yet known; resource depletion, drought, and clashes with the newly arrived Yavapai people have been suggested. The Sinagua likely moved north to Homolovi and beyond, becoming the Hopi. The San Francisco Peaks (which mark the city of Flagstaff's northern border) are a sacred site in Hopi culture, and the culture of many other southwestern Native groups.
Archeological and linguistic evidence suggests that the Yavapai people began developing independently from the Patayan at some point around 1300 CE. Until western expansion in the 1860s, the Yavapai, specifically the (Northeastern Yavapai), occupied the land up to the San Francisco Peaks. groups had tumultuous relations with the nearby Havasupai and Hualapai people from around 1750. Though the Pai peoples all spoke Upland Yuman dialects, and had a common cultural history, each peoples had tales of a dispute that separated them from each other; according to myth, the dispute began with a "mudball fight between children". The Yavapai land in the area saw overlap with the land of the Northern Tonto Apache that stretched across the San Francisco Peaks to the Little Colorado River.
Of the Northern Tonto Apache, two tribes lived within the area of present-day Flagstaff: the Oak Creek band and the Mormon Lake band. Only the Mormon Lake band consisted entirely of Apache Indians, as the other three Northern Tonto bands mixed with the Yavapai; the Mormon Lake band also faced off against the Navajo to the north and east of their land. The Oak Creek band was largely centered near Sedona, but lived as far north as Flagstaff, with the Mormon Lake band centered around Flagstaff. They were exclusively hunter-gatherers, and traveled around places like the foot of the San Francisco Peaks, at Mount Elden, Lake Mary, Stoneman Lake, and Padre Canyon.
A US Army Corps of Engineers book notes that Flagstaff did not have a colonial Spanish presence. There were Spanish missionaries about away in 1629, originating the San Francisco name in Arizona, with later 17th century Spanish Franciscans giving the San Francisco Peaks their name.
Establishment
The area of Flagstaff had a wagon road to California in the 1800s, constructed by Edward Fitzgerald Beale's men, with a spring (Antelope/Old Town Spring) nearby. There was also a supplies station situated 7 miles northwest of the present city, near Leroux Springs, from 1856 to about 1876. The Leroux Springs are named for Antoine Leroux, the guide of the Sitgreaves Expedition who led them to the spring in 1851. It has been suggested that Flagstaff owes its existence to Leroux and this expedition; Beale was an admirer of Leroux and made sure his paths traveled by the springs, and in turn it was from Beale's wagon road that the city developed.
The first white (non-Native) settlement in the area was established by Edward Whipple, who opened a saloon on the wagon road in 1871. At the time, the area was known as Antelope Spring. The first permanent settlement came in 1876, when Thomas F. McMillan built a cabin just north of the present-day main town. McMillan had been born in Tennessee, but prospected gold in California and reared sheep in Australia; in northern Arizona he started a successful sheep farm. McMillan was a key developer of northern Arizona.
The city was founded on July 4, 1876, with a flag-raising. A ponderosa pine flagpole made by a scouting party from Boston (known as the "Second Boston Party") was raised to celebrate the United States Centennial. This flag-raising also gave the city its name, though other stories have been told of flagstaffs that supposedly named the city: one story says that on July 4, 1855, a surveyor for the railroad and his team climbed a tall pine tree and tied a flag, with another saying it was Beale's men who raised the flag in 1859.
The town was known by different names when the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad was being built through the area in 1882. It may have been known as Flagstaff Spring for a while, and 'Old Town Spring' after this before simply 'Old Town'. The name 'Old Town' was given to the original settlement either before or after a fire destroyed it. For the former, the story goes that the railroad depot was moved by half a mile to avoid hill starts, and business owners soon followed it, displacing the commerce of the town to Front Street of 'New Town' while the houses were still in 'Old Town' with the spring; when the fire burned down 'Old Town', 'New Town' remained. For the latter, the story says that after the fire destroyed much of the town, a new community was then raised a few hundred yards away and called 'New Town', deeming the burnt-out area the 'Old Town'. Local Moenkopi red sandstone had been used as the foundation for many of the buildings in town, and is fire-resistant; it soon became the choice building material for complete structures. The name Flagstaff was reinstated in 1884 when a post office was introduced alongside the railroad depot.
Development
During the 1880s, Flagstaff began to grow, with the early economy based on timber, sheep, and cattle. By 1886, Flagstaff was the largest city on the railroad line between Albuquerque and the west coast of the United States."Flagstaff Community Profile ." Official City Website. Retrieved on April 11, 2007. In this year, it had a population of 600 and "more saloons than all other businesses combined". In 1888, McMillan purchased an unfinished building that sits at the present-day intersection of Leroux Street and Route 66/Santa Fe Avenue, turning it into a bank and hotel known as the Bank Hotel. Coconino County was created in 1891, and Flagstaff was chosen as its county seat over nearby Williams; McMillan became chairman of the Board of Supervisors for the new county.
The next year, stagecoach tours to the Grand Canyon began running from the Bank Hotel, which also housed an opera house that doubled as an events hall for entertainment. In 1894, Massachusetts astronomer Percival Lowell hired A. E. Douglass to scout an ideal site for a new observatory. Douglass, impressed by Flagstaff's elevation, suggested it to Lowell, saying: "other things being equal, the higher we can get the better".P. Lowell to A. E. Douglass, April 16, 1894, Lowell Observatory Archives. The Lowell Observatory was constructed on Mars Hill, overlooking the town. Two years later, the specially designed Clark Telescope that Lowell had ordered was installed.
Flagstaff became incorporated as a town in 1894. The city grew rapidly, primarily due to its location along the east–west transcontinental railroad line in the United States. By the 1890s, Flagstaff found itself along one of the busiest railroad corridors in the U.S., with about 80 to 100 trains traveling through the city every day, destined for Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.Thomas W. Paradis, "From Downtown to Theme Town: Reinventing America's Smaller Historic Retail Districts", pp. 57–74 in The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation, and Self, ed. Scott A. Lukas (Lanham, Maryland, Lexington Books, 2007), In this decade, the Arizona Lumber and Timber Company was founded by the Riordan brothers to process timber. Michael and Tim Riordan worked in Flagstaff, and introduced electricity to the town for this purpose. The Riordans also built the Lake Mary area of Flagstaff, and Michael Riordan took a particular interest in protecting the surrounding native ruins of the present Walnut Canyon National Monument. The CO Bar Ranch was opened in about 1886 by the Babbitt brothers for cattle. Five Babbitt brothers from a mercantile background in Cincinnati – Billy, Charlie, Dave, Edward, and George – had set their eyes on becoming ranchers out West and sent Billy and Dave with $20,000 to buy a ranch; the brothers were told of some good, cheap, land just east of Flagstaff when in Albuquerque and took the railroad there, arriving in February 1886.
After some years, the other Babbitt brothers also moved to Flagstaff. Three of the brothers married three daughters of a Dutch merchant, who advised the men to expand their business across many avenues, which they did, opening all kinds of stores, theaters, and even a mortuary in 1892, investing their money across northern Arizona. They also introduced sheep to their cattle farm, with Billy and Charlie working as cowboys. The Babbitt family would be very influential in northern Arizona for decades (one descendant is former Governor of Arizona and Clinton's Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt). According to True West Magazine, "it was said, God made northern Arizona, and then he turned it over to the Babbitts to run."