Kingman, Arizona - History

History

Lt. Edward Fitzgerald Beale, a U.S. Navy officer in the service of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, was ordered by the U.S. War Department to build a federal wagon road across the 35th Parallel. His secondary orders were to test the feasibility of the use of camels as pack animals in the southwestern desert. Beale traveled through the present day Kingman in 1857 surveying the road and in 1859 to build the road. The road became part of Highway 66 and Interstate Highway 40. Remnants of the wagon road can still be seen in White Cliffs Canyon in Kingman.

Kingman, Arizona, was founded in 1882, when Arizona was only Arizona Territory. Situated in the Hualapai Valley between the Cerbat and Hualapai mountain ranges, Kingman is known for its very modest beginnings as a simple railroad siding near Beale’s Springs in the Middleton Section along the newly-constructed route of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. The city of Kingman was named for Lewis Kingman, who surveyed along the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad's right-of-way between Needles, Calif., and Albuquerque, N.M. Lewis Kingman supervised the building of the railroad from Winslow, Ariz. to Beale's Springs, which is near the present location of the town of Kingman.

The Mohave County seat originally was located in Mineral Park, in the settlement of Callville. This portion of Arizona Territory was transferred to Nevada in 1865 after Nevada's statehood, and became part of Clark County, Nevada. With the loss of this territory, the Mohave County seat was moved to Mohave City in 1866, and then to Hardyville (which became Bullhead City) in 1867. The county seat transferred to the mining town of Cerbat in 1871, then to Mineral Park near Chloride in 1872. In 1887, the county seat was moved to Kingman after some period of time without a permanent county seat, the instruments and records of Mohave County government were taken clandestinely from Chloride and moved to Kingman in the middle of the night during this final transfer of the county seat.

During World War II, Kingman was the site of a U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF) airfield. The Kingman Army Airfield was founded at the beginning of WW II as an aerial gunnery training base. It became one of the USAAF's largest, training some 35,000 soldiers and airmen. The airfield and Kingman played a significant role in this important era of America's history. Following the war, the Kingman airfield served as one of the largest and best-known reclamation sites for obsolete military aircraft.

Postwar, Kingman experienced growth as several major employers moved into the vicinity. In 1953 Kingman was used to detain those men accused of practicing polygamy in the Short Creek raid, which was at the time one of the largest arrests in American history. In 1955, Ford Motor Company established a proving ground (now one of the Chrysler Proving Grounds) in nearby Yucca, Arizona at the former Yucca Army Airfield. Several major new neighborhoods in Kingman were developed to house the skilled workers and professionals employed at the proving ground, as Kingman was the only sizable, developed town within a convenient distance. Likewise, the development of the Duval copper mine near adjacent Chloride, Arizona, and construction of the Mohave Generating Station in nearby Laughlin, Nevada, in 1971 contributed to Kingman's population growth. The location of a General Cable plant at what was to become the Kingman Airport Industrial Park provided a steady employment base as well.