Blue Diamond History Committee (Clark County, Nev.)

Blue Diamond, Nevada was once a small town named Cottonwood Springs. It was turned into a company town by the Blue Diamond Materials Company in the 1940s and today exists as an unincorporated, census-designated place (CDP). The Blue Diamond History Committee began organizing in 2003, when community members of the village started discussing the preservation of a remnant of an old adobe house located in the village, the first dwelling of settlers in the area. The community decided to begin gathering oral histories to preserve the history of Blue Diamond residents, as well as its buildings. This oral history project captured around one-hundred stories with the help of Lied Library's Oral History Research Center in Special Collections at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Along with those efforts, people donated materials from their childhood in the village, and when the Blue Diamond Mine closed for a time in 2005, many of their documents were brought down and donated as well. The committee organized the donated materials into a variety of binders and boxes meant to represent the history of their town, and also potentially preserve the area as an open air walking museum. Other projects the committee worked on were developing educational lessons for the local school children to learn how the nearby Cottonwood Springs helped sustain settlement there, and how water is a vital resource for desert settlements in general. The overall goal of these projects was to connect their community to the children and pass on the importance of their history to the next generation of Blue Diamond residents in order to help preserve the area.

Sources:

van Betten, Patricia. Interview, 2007 February 6. OH-01864. Transcript. Oral History Research Center, Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada.