Welcome To The Boulder City /Hoover Dam Museum Located In The Historic Boulder Dam Hotel
	Our Vintage Photograph Collection - Women When we think of Hoover Dam construction today, we usually think about the men working and sweating in the heat of Black Canyon, riding the transports back and forth to the dam site, lining up for their pay twice a month, and then racing into Las Vegas to gamble, drink, and whore around Block 16. It's true the Boulder Canyon Project was a man's world: most of the population of Boulder City was male, all the government and Six Companies executives and bosses were men, and all the Washington bureaucrats who oversaw the project from their plush offices were Misters. But from the earliest days of the Hoover Dam project, women were involved in a variety of ways, their contributions today largely forgotten or overlooked in the glare of heroic construction stories. Yet it took a great deal of heroism to follow husbands into the desolation of southern Nevada and set up a household, particularly if there were children along. It took a lot of courage to establish successful businesses in Boulder City's commercial brotherhood. Women founded most of Boulder City's social clubs and organizations; they were a significant presence in entertainment, education, office work, sports, medicine, and religious endeavors. Some of the finest journalism about the Boulder Canyon Project was produced by women. Florence Lee Jones was a stringer for several national and international publications whose bylined stories on dam construction appeared around the world. Jones, in fact, was the only woman allowed unrestricted access to the dam site. Polly Carmody, whose husband, Don, was a Bureau of Reclamation engineer, wrote a series of first-person articles for the Reclamation Era that remain among the most compelling and entertaining ever written about the project.

In one of her early articles, Polly, who died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1933, described her life as a construction engineer's wife. Her description rang true for all the wives who followed their husbands to the Boulder Canyon Project:

"This woman is no gypsy of the road but, having cast her lot with such a one, her mission in life consists of following him to the far corners of the earth and if she is fortunate she in time grows hardened to leaving one beloved home after another. She spends one-half of her life in packing her lares and penates and the other half in assembling and mending what is left of them. She plants quick-growing vines, such as gourd or cucumber, over the doors of each new home whether it be a cute little bungalow or a rude tar-paper shack and by putting dainty curtains at the windows and strewing rugs on the floor manages to impart an appearance of rest and permanence." [New Reclamation Era v. 22:9 (September 1931), 202]

Flora Hensel on Avenue M in Boulder City, c. 1932.

Mother and children in the hobo jungles of Las Vegas, c. 1931.

Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal, June 24, 1931, 1:4.

Families were often abandoned by their husbands and fathers who came West looking for work on the Boulder Canyon Project. Mrs. Frank Stoddard, destitute and with her eight-month-old baby, hitchhiked 3000 miles from New York to Boulder City looking for her husband. She arrived in Las Vegas with 20¢ in her pocket, begging for work. Subsequent stories do not indicate whether she found Frank. Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal, August 18, 1931, 3:2.

Edith Powell was the first woman to live in what became Boulder City while her husband, Lloyd, helped build the town's water tank. Shown here in 1931 near her tent on the Boulder City town site with her dog, Teddy, Powell told a Los Angeles Examiner reporter, "Where my husband goes, that's where I go. He wants me with him and I want to be with him. We've been in lots worse places than this. There's going to be a grand city here someday." Edith died in a Las Vegas nursing home on October 19, 1975.

Unidentified nurses in the Six Companies hospital, c. 1933-34.

Unidentified nurses in the Six Companies hospital, c. 1933-34.

These wives lived in tourist bungalows at the Boulder City Auto Court in 1932 while they waited for worker's housing to be built. [l-r: Lucille Burt; Mrs. Stetson; Mrs. Smith; Mrs. Kearns; Mrs. Wilkins; Mrs. Matthews; Mrs. Loman].

Anna Bissell, a school teacher who followed her carpenter brother to Boulder City, established a school at the Railroad Wye in 1931 for children who lived nearby. The Railroad Wye was a squatters camp on the western outskirts of Boulder City near the rail yards. Government engineers had failed to plan schools for Boulder City.

This image of prostitutes at the Arizona Club on Las Vegas's Block 16 is enlarged from a photograph taken by Winthrop Davis, c. 1931-32. Blocks 16 and 17 had been set aside in 1905 to serve as Las Vegas's red light district, which it remained until the eve of World War II. During the early 1930s Block 16 with its brothels, sawdust gambling joints, flop houses, and bars was the favorite playground for Hoover Dam construction stiffs. There were also brothels and speakeasies scattered along US 93/95 between Las Vegas and Boulder City. Railroad Pass, a casino opened in July 1931 just beyond the gate of the Boulder Canyon Project Federal Reservation, had cribs on the hillside behind where prostitutes worked their johns. In his diary on January 28, 1935, Frank C. "Doc" Jensen, Hoover Dam medic, wrote of his favorite Railroad Pass hooker, "$2 to Babe to "blow it."

Prostitutes at the Arizona Club on Las Vegas's Block 16.

Regional meeting of the Episcopal Church at St. Christopher's, Boulder City, May 1935.

Office staff for the Bureau of Reclamation in Boulder City, December 15, 1931 [l-r; Hannah Houn; Cecile Dotson; Rose Crippa].

Boulder City Women's Baseball Team, 1933.

Boulder City women golfers, c. 1933.

Unidentified woman clerk with the Bureau of Mines in Boulder City, 1936.

The Babcock and Wilcox Company, the contractor who manufactured the penstock pipes for Hoover dam, employed a number of women in its Hoover Dam office. Pictured in the top photograph, left to right, are Edwin Uhl, accountant for the Babcock and Wilcox Company; his daughter, Margaret Jean Uhl, who worked with her father; Hale Luff; and Betty Eichleay, c. 1934. Betty Eichleay's father was John Eichleay, Sr., the subcontractor who installed the penstocks at Hoover Dam.

Helen Chadburn Lawrence was a popular singer with her brother's dance band, shown here in the early 1930s. The band played such venues as Railroad Pass, Lorenzi's Resort, and the Meadows nightclub in Las Vegas. Band members shown, l-r, include Helen; Tommy Nelson [trumpet]; Clark "Chad" Chadburn [piano]; Otto Littler [saxophone]; Keith Hickman [drums]; Bud Holmes [saxophone]; and Jack Hernie [saxophone]. In 1954, Helen shot to death her husband, Phare Lawrence, on Main Street in Las Vegas. Sentenced to life in prison for first degree murder, Helen was paroled in 1959.

Maxine Harrison, shown here in October 1933, worked in the federal/state employment office in Las Vegas for Nevada Deputy Labor Commissioner Leonard Blood. Maxine felt sorry for the older men with families who came looking for work and often slipped their applications in ahead of the younger men.

Virginia McCormick, a Stockton, California businesswoman, established Boulder City's first circulating library on April 11, 1932 in the Nava-Hopi Indian Store, a gift shop and trading post she managed for owner Sam Richardson. The Nava-Hopi sold Native American pottery, jewelry, rugs, clothing, and other crafts. McCormick took over the store in June 1932 and turned it into a center of Boulder City culture. She sold pottery from famed San Ildefonso Pueblo artist Maria Martinez, and brought Native American artists and jewelers in for public demonstrations of their work.

Virginia sponsored the town's first art shows, including what may have been the first public exhibition of the work of noted photographer Bernard "Ben" Glaha whose images of Hoover Dam construction became world-famous. The Nava-Hopi was the first stop for tourists on their way to the dam, and was a gathering place for Boulder City's intellectuals where long discussions about art and literature took place long after closing. McCormick sold the Nava-Hopi in 1936 to Leonard and Corene Atkison.

Virginia McCormick's daughter, Sally, with potter Maria Martinez, c. 1934-35.

Ida Browder, 1938

Ida Browder came to Boulder City in 1931 to open a cafe on the corner of Ash Street and Nevada Way. Browder's Lunch was the first private restaurant in Boulder City's early business district, opening December 28, 1931. Ida was one of the great movers in Boulder City--she sponsored the first public library in town, the Marbus Browder Memorial Library, named for her son who died in a meningitis epidemic in June 1932; helped establish the Boulder City Commercial Association, which became the Chamber of Commerce; was on the Boulder City School Board; founded numerous civic organizations; and took an active hand in Boulder City's incorporation during the 1940s and '50s. She counted among her friends most of Nevada's political figures, many of whom sought her advice. In 1936, Browder herself ran for the Nevada State Assembly, although she lost. Ida died in Boulder City on January 11, 1961, the day after her 72nd birthday. Browder's Lunch, today known as the Mel's Diner, is still in business in the same building still owned by the Browder family.

Browder's Lunch on Nevada Way, 1932 [the child on the running board is Ida's daughter, Ida].

Ida Browder surrounded by Boulder City Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees, 1939.

Ida was chairman of the infantile paralysis campaign, and the small wooden "wishing wells" were made by students at Las Vegas High School from a model created by Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees. The wells were used in the paralysis campaign to collect money.

Lady tourists at Hoover Dam, 1936.

1. Building Hoover Dam: An Oral History of the Great Depression, by Andrew Dunar and Dennis McBride [Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2000]

2. The Role of Women During the Construction of Hoover Dam, by Teresa Van Buren [unpublished paper, 1995]

3. "Impressions of an Engineer's Wife on Her First Trip to the Site of Hoover Dam," by Mrs. D. L. Carmody [New Reclamation Era, v. 22:6 (June 1931), 136-37]

4. "A Visit to the Hoover Dam Site," by Mrs. D. L. Carmody [New Reclamation Era, v. 22:8 (August 1931), 172-74]

5. "What the Reclamation Women Do in Las Vegas," by Mrs. D. L. Carmody [New Reclamation Era, v. 22:9 (September 1931), 202--03]

6. "Boulder City--From a Woman's Viewpoint," by Mrs. D. L. Carmody [New Reclamation Era, v. 23:3 (March 1932), 66-68]

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



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