A list of important historic sites in Arizona.
Location: Keams Canyon, Navajo County
Relevant issues: American Indian history, European settlement
Statement of significance: Located on the Hopi Indian Reservation, Awatovi Ruins is the site of one of the most important Hopi Indian villages encountered by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s men in 1540. It contains the remains of a five-hundred-year-old pueblo and a seventeenth century Spanish mission complex. Excavations were conducted at the site by the Peabody Museum in the 1930’s.
Location: Springerville, Apache County
Relevant issues: American Indian history
Statement of significance: Situated on terraces of a fallen basalt cliff along the upper Little Colorado River, the site dates from late Pueblo III to early Pueblo IV (1250-1325
Location: Tucson, Pima County
Relevant issues: Science and technology
Statement of significance: Established in 1903 by the Carnegie Institution for the purpose of studying “the methods by which plants perform their functions under the extraordinary conditions existing in deserts,” the Desert Laboratory was for over thirty-five years the center for the study of North American desert ecology. Much of the framework of plant ecology generally, and desert ecology in particular, was formulated here.
Location: Gila Bend, Maricopa County
Relevant issues: American Indian history
Statement of significance: Probably first occupied sometime before 900
Location: Ganado, Apache County
Relevant issues: American Indian history, western expansion
Statement of significance: This still-active trading post represents the varied interactions of Navajos and the white traders who ran trading posts on the Navajo Reservation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Location: Jerome, Yavapai County
Relevant issues: Business and industry
Statement of significance: Jerome was one of the richest copper-producing areas in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The town and surrounding mining area illustrate the historic activities associated with copper production.
Location: Whiteriver, Gila County
Relevant issues: American Indian history
Statement of significance: This site contains the ruins of a pueblo capable of housing up to one thousand Indians that was abandoned about 1400
Location: Flagstaff, Coconino County
Relevant issues: Science and technology
Statement of significance: Founded in 1894 by Percival Lowell (1855-1916), this relatively small observatory was at the time the one significant center of pure scientific research in the Southwest. Here, Lowell studied Mars (and theorized that it was inhabited by intelligent beings) and performed the computations that led to the discovery of Pluto; A. E. Douglass (1867-1962) conducted research that led to the modern science of dendrochronology; and, in 1912, V. M. Slipher (1875-1969) discovered that the universe was expanding. The observatory is still in operation.
Location: Oraibi, Navajo County
Relevant issues: American Indian history
Statement of significance: Located on the westernmost of the Hopi mesas, this is probably the oldest continuously inhabited pueblo in the Southwest. Old Oraibi documents Hopi culture and history from before European contact to the present day. The village is on the present Hopi Indian Reservation.
Location: Pueblo Grande City Park, Phoenix, Maricopa County
Relevant issues: American Indian history
Web site: www.arizonaguide.com/pueblogrande
Statement of significance: The prehistoric platform mound and associated archaeological remains at Pueblo Grande represent one of the last surviving urban architectural sites of its kind in the southwestern United States. There is evidence that between 1100 and 1400
Location: Globe, Gila County
Relevant issues: Science and technology
Statement of significance: Erected between 1906 and 1911, the world’s highest masonry dam is acknowledged for its outstanding engineering. Roosevelt Dam was the first major public works project completed under the National Reclamation Act, which was enacted in 1902 during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration. Roosevelt Dam was designed as a storage facility to increase the agricultural productivity of this arid region along the Salt River.
Location: Tucson, Pima County
Relevant issues: American Indian history, European settlement, religion
Statement of significance: Founded in 1700 by the Jesuits, Bac then formed the extreme northern thrust of Nueva Espana. The present structure is the third, perhaps the fourth, church on the site. Consecrated by Franciscans, it was begun in 1783 and completed in 1797. One of the finest Spanish Colonial churches in the country, it is a synthesis of Baroque design and the desert materials from which it was built by Papago Indian laborers supervised by Spanish-American master craftsmen.
Location: Yuma
Relevant issues: American Indian history, western expansion
Statement of significance: First used by Native Americans, this natural crossing served as a significant transportation gateway on the Colorado River during the Spanish Colonial and U.S. westward expansion periods. The surviving buildings of the Yuma Quartermaster Depot and Arizona Territorial Prison are the key features on the Arizona side of the border; across the river, in California, stand the surviving buildings of Fort Yuma, an Army outpost that guarded the crossing from 1850 to 1885.