At 726 feet, Boulder Dam was the tallest in the world when it was completed. Although it wasn’t formally done until 1936, it was dedicated by President Roosevelt in September, 1935. Union Pacific published this brochure just one month later. The dam was a source of pride for Americans, and for Union Pacific it was a source of revenue as most of the construction materials were brought in by rail.

Click image to download a 19.6-MB PDF of this brochure.

The name “Boulder Dam” is a misnomer as a dam was originally proposed for Boulder Canyon but ended up being built in Black Canyon. The 1928 law authorizing a dam “at Black Canyon or Boulder Canyon” was called the Boulder Canyon Project Act, but didn’t name the dam. When construction began in 1930, the Secretary of the Interior declared it should be named after President Hoover, who was an engineer himself. But when Roosevelt became president, the Democrats didn’t want to finish a dam named after a defeated opponent, so insisted it be called Boulder Dam. In 1947, however, Congress declared that it should be named Hoover Dam.

The birdseye-view map on the back of this brochure is signed Gerald A. (for Allen) Eddy, and I suspect he did the cover painting as well. Eddy was born in Michigan in 1890 and his family moved to Los Angeles in 1902 when that city still had fewer than 150,000 residents. Gerald and his younger brother Frederic Arden Eddy both became artists, with Fred doing commercial art for the New York Herald Tribune while Gerald concentrated on maps such as the one in this brochure. Gerald died in Glendale in 1967.

The scans for this brochure are from the David Rumsey Map Collection. For some reason, the collection’s curators scanned this brochure at 500 dpi, producing files totaling 340 megabytes. Although 19.6-MB seems large compared with some of the other brochures I’ve posted, it is a lot more reasonable than 340 MB. Still, I’d rather start with files that are too big rather than too small.