Abstract
The Six Companies, Inc. Hoover Dam Photograph Collection (1931-1935), consists of approximately 400 black-and-white photographic prints contained in two photograph albums and an additional twenty-one loose black-and-white photographic prints with ten corresponding photographic negatives.
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Scope and Contents Note
The Six Companies, Inc. Hoover Dam Photograph Collection (1931-1935) documents the progress and successful completion of the Hoover Dam, located in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River in southern Nevada.
Although the United States Bureau of Reclamation kept a complete photographic record of the dam construction, the consortium of engineers and contractors who formed the Six Companies wanted its own record and hired Walter J. Lubken as the official photographer. His photographs were collected into a series of albums entitled “Photographic Record, Hoover Dam Project, Six Companies” and presented to representatives of the consortium.
The albums in this collection were designated “W. H. Bechtel Scrapbooks, volume one and two,” although only one original cover survives. This cover is gilt stamped and bears the name W. H. Bechtel, president of Bechtel Company, the leading partner in the Six Companies. The materials consist of approximately 400 black-and-white photographic prints contained in two photograph albums and an additional twenty-one loose black-and-white photographic prints with ten corresponding photographic negatives. All photograph titles correspond to those printed in the albums.
Access Note
Collection is open for research.
Publication Rights
Materials in this collection may be protected by copyrights and other rights. See Reproductions and Use on the UNLV Special Collections and Archives website for more information about reproductions and permissions to publish.
Arrangement
Materials remain in original order.
Biographical / Historical Note
Hoover Dam, built between 1931 and 1935, was designed to control the flood-prone Colorado River, generate cheap electricity to supply power to homes and industry, and provide work for the thousands who desperately needed jobs during the Great Depression. Passed by Congress in 1929, the Boulder Canyon Project Act provided the appropriations needed to begin construction and the government announced that bidding would open in February of 1931.
A consortium of six engineering and construction firms, led by William H. Wattis and Warren A. Bechtel, incorporated under the name Six Companies, Inc. one month before the government opened the bidding for the dam construction. In March of 1931, the company won the right to build the concrete arch dam at a cost of nearly $49 million (roughly equivalent to $826 million in 2019). Work began in April in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River with the project officially named the Boulder Dam after the Boulder Canyon ten miles upstream from Black Canyon. Government geologists and engineers had initially chosen Boulder Canyon for the dam in 1921, but by 1930 it was clear that Black Canyon was a more suitable location. The location changed but the name remained until the dam was dedicated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in September 1935.
The Six Companies, Inc. completed the dam project in just over five years, two years ahead of schedule and under budget, creating the largest masonry structure built in the twentieth century to that date. The Hoover Dam required 4.4 million cubic yards of concrete, 133 million pounds of plate and reinforced steel, 6.7 million pounds of pipes and fittings, and the labor of almost 5,000 men.
Source:
Simonds, William J.. "The Boulder Canyon Project: Hoover Dam". United States Bureau of Reclamation. August 14, 2015. Accessed October 24, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20160209044559/https://www.usbr.gov/history/hoover.html
Warren A. Bechtel was born September 12, 1872, the son of John Moyer and Elizabeth Bentz Bechtel. In 1884 the family moved from a farm in Illinois to Peabody, Kansas. After high school graduation, Bechtel worked briefly as a musician before returning to the family farm, but poor conditions left him with nothing but four healthy mules. When the Chicago Rock Island and Peoria Railway Company pushed westward in 1889, Bechtel gathered up his mule team and worked his way across the continent grading rail beds for frontier train lines.
In 1898 he formed the W. A. Bechtel Company. The young company began many new ventures, including construction of the Northern California Highway and the Norman Dam, which was at the time the second largest rock-fill dam in the world. By the time the company incorporated in 1925, it was the largest construction firm in the western United States, operated by the senior Bechtel and his two sons.
In February 1931, Bechtel became vice-president of Six Companies, Inc., a consortium created to bid for the government contract to build the Hoover Dam in Southern Nevada. The company won the contract with a $49 million bid, and soon after Bechtel was named president after the death of W. H. Wattis, head of the Utah Construction Company and organizer of Six Companies. Work on the dam, the largest engineering project of its kind in the world at that date, began in April of 1931 and was completed on March 1, 1936.
Warren Bechtel, like his predecessor Wattis, did not live to see the project completed, dying unexpectedly on August 28, 1933 at age 60 while on a business trip to Moscow, Russia.
Sources:
"Warren A. Bechtel obituary". The Peabody Gazette-Herald, October 5, 1933, page 5. Accessed October 24 2019. http://peabody.advantage-preservation.com/Viewer/?fn=the_peabody_gazette-herald_usa_kansas_peabody_19331012_english_5
Simonds, William J. "The Boulder Canyon Project: Hoover Dam". United States Bureau of Reclamation. Accessed October 24, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20160209044559/https://www.usbr.gov/history/hoover.html
Preferred Citation
Six Companies, Inc. Hoover Dam Photograph Collection, 1931-1935. PH-00267. Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada.
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Acquisition Note
Materials were received approximately 1975; accession number 2019-095.
Processing Note
In 2019, as part of an archival backlog elimination project, Melise Leech rehoused and arranged the materials, wrote the finding aid and entered the data into ArchivesSpace. In 2022, Sarah Jones rewrote the inventory to align the description with linked digital objects.
Additional Description
Existence and Location of Copies
A facsimile version of the original photograph albums, created by conservator Michael Frazier, is on display in the UNLV Special Collections and Archives reading room.