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Guest column<br><br>The story of Williams began on C. T. Rogers’ cattle ranch<br>

He named his rawboned forest settlement after a nearby mountain named 30 years earlier for Bill Williams, a fur trapper and explorer.

Workers laying Atlantic and Pacific tracks reached here Sept. 1, 1882.

There was no indoor plumbing, no electricity, telephones or paved streets. Clothes were washed by hand. Light was from kerosene lamps. People cooked, heated water and tried to stay warm with wood burning stoves. Many had a cow for milk and chickens for eggs.

A general store sold groceries, guns and ammunition, tools and ready-made clothes.

And there were saloons, gambling halls and houses of prostitution, some of them in tents. The 1882 population, including families on nearby ranches, was between 200 and 250.

The first school with one room for 23 students opened September, 1883 near the intersection of today’s Second Street and Route 66.

Train service to and from the West Coast began the following month and by that time there was a small hotel here and two general stores. There was no city government. A Yavapai County deputy sheriff and a justice of the peace provided law enforcement.

Water then and for the next 15 years came from public wells. Residents carried water home in pails or had it delivered in barrels by wagon.

There were three restaurants, a boarding house, laundry, feed store, livery stable, blacksmith and carpenter shops, doctor’s and lawyer’s offices and a drug store by the mid-1880s.

In 1887 a Fred Harvey restaurant opened at the railroad depot. Two years later a weekly newspaper called the Williams News began publication.

Before the end of the 1880s sightseers arriving by train were riding stagecoaches from Williams to the Grand Canyon. A one-way trip took 10 to 12 hours.

A grass killing drought began here and all over Arizona in 1893. Ranchers shipped 20,000 head of cattle from Williams to Kansas by train for better grazing during one two-month period.

And that same year a national economic depression made things considerably worse. Factories by the hundreds closed all over the country, the price of cattle dropped 50 percent and the wool market collapsed.

But in the midst of all that trouble Williams residents raised $800 to buy uniforms and brass instruments for a town band so there could be community concerts and parades with music.

Dances and boxing matches were held at the Opera House. The town baseball team traveled by train to other towns for games. Construction of a sawmill which would create 300 new jobs started near where the Williams High School is now. Stonemasons were building a dam just south of town to increase the water supply by creating a reservoir for the railroad’s steam locomotives.

The drought ended in late spring of 1894. The rains came, the grass turned green and surviving ranchers began to believe they wouldn’t be wiped out after all.

Residents shared their optimism and built a new two-room brick schoolhouse. They paid $1,000 for a survey of a railroad route to the Grand Canyon, organized a drama club to stage theatrical productions at the Opera House and a literary club for book lovers.

By one count there were 28 businesses selling liquor here in the late 1890s when the population was a little above 1,000. The name of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad was changed to Santa Fe Pacific.

In 1898 some Williams families began to enjoy the luxury of running water pumped from a well by a steam engine and piped to their houses.

Construction of the Grand Canyon Railway began. And Thomas Edison’s light bulbs began to replace kerosene lamps when a boiler, steam engine and electric generator were installed on today’s Route 66 just west of Sixth Street.

Two rooms were added to the school in 1900. Construction of the Grand Canyon Railway was completed the year after and regularly scheduled passenger service to the canyon’s south rim began.

That same year, 1901, a fire nearly wiped out the business district. The only way to fight it was with water thrown from buckets and 38 business buildings and 10 residences were destroyed.

As a result of the disaster the town was incorporated and a city government created to provide money for adequate fire protection by collecting business fees and other taxes. The first electric streetlights were installed, telephone lines connected Williams and Flagstaff, and the town faced forward into the great unknown of the 20th Centur


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