Category Archives: Arizona Territory

Arizonans Should Celebrate Theodore Roosevelt’s Birthday

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Theodore Roosevelt's birthday, Roosevelt Dam, Reclamation Act, 1911, Arizona history, Arizona historian, AZHistorian, John Larsen Southard, John Southard, Southard

The recently dedicated Roosevelt Dam dominated the colorful cover of the August 12th, 1911 edition of Scientific American.

Renaissance man Theodore Roosevelt was born 155 years ago yesterday in New York City, a place very different from the far-off and not-then existent Arizona Territory that would later derive great benefit from his presidency.

Roosevelt is most closely associated with our state through his leadership of the courageous Rough Riders of Spanish-American War fame, many of whom hailed from Arizona. While not as widely known and arguably far less interesting than the battlefield heroics of the all-volunteer Rough Riders, Arizonans should also recognize Roosevelt for signing the 1902 Newlands Reclamation Act into law. This landmark legislation authorized several large-scale water reclamation projects in the arid lands west of the 100th meridian, including our Roosevelt Dam.

Completed in 1911, the $10 million Roosevelt Dam helped to ensure Valley residents a reliable water supply, thereby largely ending the decades-long struggle against unpredictable supplies of water that left Phoenix-area farm fields flooded in times of overabundant precipitation and parched in times of drought. The project’s significance was not lost on local residents or the press, as evidenced by the March 19, 1911 edition of the Arizona Republican that bore headlines proclaiming “Life Blood of Valley Turned Into its Arteries by Theodore Roosevelt,” thus signaling a “Triumphant Ending of the Great Project.”

Today just one among the string of several dams along the Salt River, the now-enlarged Roosevelt Dam has been vitally important to the vitality and prosperity of the Phoenix metropolitan area for more than a century. However, the dam’s importance – widely recognized during its construction and through the present day – and Roosevelt’s much-publicized 1911 visit still failed to deliver Arizona’s 1912 electoral college votes to third-party candidate Roosevelt, who fared better in the state than Republican Howard Taft, Socialist Eugene V. Debs, and Prohibition nominee Eugene W. Chafin, but couldn’t top the vote tally of Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

The Arizona State Fair – A Longstanding Tradition

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The Arizona State Fair, which opened on October 11th and will run through November 3rd, has been held at its present location since December of 1905, when the celebration was known as the Arizona Territorial Fair in recognition of the soon-to-be state’s legal status within the Union. Initially staged in 1884 on land adjacent to the Salt River, the fair was forced into hiatus following the then undammed river’s catastrophic 1891 flood. By mid-1905, a group Arizona civic leaders hoping to resume fair activities organized the Arizona Territorial Fair Association. This entity paid $9,200 for eighty acres of land at what the Los Angeles Times reported to be “an especially good” location with the intent of providing a new home for the displaced fair.

The relocation and return of the multi-day gathering of Arizonans and out-of-state visitors proved tremendously successful, with the Arizona Republican newspaper proclaiming the undertaking to have “opened most auspiciously” and closed in “a brilliant finish.” The illustrations below bookended the Republican’s coverage of the 1905 affair. The top drawing shows Miss Phoenix welcoming a large and eager crowd to the Arizona Territorial Fair, while the bottom image depicts Miss Phoenix preparing for bed upon the event’s closing, with a caption declaring, “Now I’m content and can take a much needed rest.” The letter shown on the table in the bottom piece is addressed to Miss Phoenix and reads, “Miss Phoenix: We, the people of Arizona and the Southwest, congratulate you upon the success of the fair.”