The Boulder City/Hoover Dam Museum offers three-dimensional, interactive displays and exhibits, photographs, artifacts, and oral histories of the men and women who built Hoover Dam.

Welcome To The
Boulder City /Hoover Dam Museum
Located In The Historic Boulder Dam Hotel

Our Vintage Photograph Collection - Children

In the November 1932 issue of the Reclamation Era, Boulder City's city manager, Sims Ely, wrote that the birth rate in Boulder City was "much higher than in any other town in the United States, owing to the fact that this is the only community in the whole country in which substantially all the families are young." The average age of Hoover Dam workers was 34, and when they began drifting into southern Nevada hoping for work on the Boulder Canyon Project, most of them had wives and children in tow. In 1931, the first year of dam construction, about 200 babies were born around the project, in addition to nearly 300 children of various ages already living with their families. In 1932, 220 babies were born to Boulder City mothers, and in 1933, there were 340 babies. While the rest of the country was suffering through the Great Depression and a new baby only meant another mouth to feed, Boulder City families had jobs and homes provided by the Six Companies and the Bureau of Reclamation. These children grew up in the bosom of Roosevelt's New Deal, largely escaping the social and economic horror that lay just beyond the city limits.

May Day celebration in Wilbur Square, Boulder City, c. 1938

Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal, December 11, 1931

Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal, November 20, 1931

The first baby born in Boulder City was Nellie Fay Muckelroy. She was born at home to Hoover Dam rigger Bean Muckelroy and his wife, Luella, on November 19, 1931. Nellie Muckelroy, c. 1934.

Ernest A. Miller and Bonnie Vaughn at Park Street and Wilbur Square below the Bureau of Reclamation administration building, 1935. Ernie's father owned the butcher shop in the Manix Department Store in which Bonnie's father was a partner.

Willette "Billie" Budroe in a rare Boulder City snowstorm, December 11, 1932.

On April 26, 1935 Boulder City Boy Scouts planted a memorial tree in Wilbur Square.

Wash tub swimming pools behind 647 Avenue F, c. 1939 [l-r: Patricia Fenton; unidentified boy; Donna Fenton; Madeline Traasdahl; Roger Traasdahl].

Patricia Fenton and Roger Traasdahl playing on a gravel pile in the backyard of 647 Avenue F, c. 1938-39.

Ray Yandell earned pocket money with a magazine route in Boulder City in 1934. He sold the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, and the County Gentleman.

Therese Courture [standing, right] taught the first dance classes in Boulder City. These are the "Soft Breezes" from Courture's Spring Recital of 1939.

On November 10, 1935, the Civilian Conservation Corps moved into Boulder City, taking over three abandoned Hoover Dam workers' dormitories. The Corps was established by Franklin Roosevelt in the spring of 1933 as a way to provide otherwise jobless young men with work for the benefit of the public. Open to boys 17 to 28 years old, the Corps built all the tourist facilities around Lake Mead for the National Park Service, improved Boulder City's airport, and conducted archeological digs in the Moapa Valley ahead of the rising lake.

CCC boys laying pipe on the shore of Lake Mead, c. 1936-1937.

Lunch break, c. 1936-37.

CCC football team, c. 1937.

John Jensen Garner posed in a 30' penstock pipe section with his grandfather, John Andrew Jensen, 1934.

Chester Lee Hamby and his sister, Mae at Hoover Dam, 1935.

Sixth grade class in Boulder City, October 5, 1932.

The American Legion, founded in Boulder City in 1931, was one of the most active organizations in the town's early years. In 1934, the children of Legion members founded their own organization: the Sons of the American Legion. In 1939, the Sons sponsored a popular orchestra which played for dances throughout the state. The orchestra was disbanded in 1943 because most of the members had gone off to war.

Sons of the American Legion Orchestra, 1939.

The Sons of the American Legion also sponsored an award-winning Drum and Bugle Corps, shown here in parade, c. 1939.

Elspeth Watts, shown here c. 1933, was the daughter of power company engineer H. O. Watts and lived in the government section of Boulder City at 311 Utah Street. This was the "white collar" part of town where the Bureau of Reclamation provided substantial brick homes and took care of all the landscaping and property maintenance.

Barbara McKean, however, lived in the Six Companies end of Boulder City, which was the "blue collar" section of town, derisively known as "the flats." The fathers of these children were laborers at Hoover Dam or lower-echelon clerks and office personnel for the company. Barbara, in the swing, is surrounded by her friends Farnie Blower, Dolores Kahn, and her sister, Dicky Kahn, c. 1934.

Despite the relative safety children in Boulder City enjoyed, they often suffered from disease and crime.
Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal, June 24, 1931.

Williamsville was a squatter camp, also known as Ragtown, on the banks of the Colorado River near the mouth of Black Canyon. Temperatures in the summer of 1931 rose as high as 140 degrees in the open sunlight. This Ragtown father punished his two sons by tying them up and staking them outside his shack while he went to work. When Claude Williams, the government ranger in charge of Ragtown, discovered the boys, their faces burned and blistered, he took them away from their father and threw the man off the project reservation.

Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal, November 14, 1934

Drinking and gambling were illegal in Boulder City during dam construction days, but Las Vegas was just 25 miles away. Mr. and Mrs. McDaniels left their children at home without food or heat to go on a three-day binge. Neighbors turned them in.
Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal, May 13, 1935

Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal, November 11, 1931

Mr. and Mrs. T. C. White, in the throes of divorce, had separated. On November 11, 1931, Mr. White and his girlfriend showed up at the Boulder City school room of teacher Winifred Hamilton and kidnapped his two little girls. Police caught up with White in Las Vegas, returned the children to their mother, and arrested their father. It was from this school room that the White daughters were kidnapped.

Disease epidemics often swept through Boulder City during construction days--scarlet fever, mumps, measles, and spinal meningitis. Whole families were sometimes quarantined; a worker arriving home from the dam might find his family locked in the house with a contagious disease and he had to find someplace else to live until they recovered.
Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal, May 16, 1934

Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal, January 22, 1932

Marbus Browder [front row, left end], son of prominent Boulder City businesswoman Ida Browder, was stricken with meningitis in June 1932. To avoid a panic and obtain medical help not available in Las Vegas, Marbus was sent secretly by train to Salt Lake City, where he died on June 24.

Sunday School for the children who lived in Railroad Pass, just beyond the Boulder City limits, c. 1933.

Boulder City Museum and Historical Association
P.O. Box 60516, Boulder City, Nevada 89006-0516
Phone: (702) 294-1988 | Fax: (702) 294-4380
E-mail: info@bcmha.org